“Five years after Apple launched its first iPod, Microsoft (Charts) is taking aim at the digital music market with its Zune player, which goes on sale Tuesday,” Wong reports. Industry experts, however, aren’t convinced the company will be able to take a bite out of Apple, which has a 70 percent share of the market for portable music players.”
“‘I’m very skeptical about its ability to take hold in a market that already has a dominant player. It doesn’t feel disruptive enough to gain a foothold,’ said Ted Schadler, an analyst at Forrester Research,” Wong reports.
Wong reports, “Many analysts aren’t buying into the idea of ‘community’ that Zune is built around… But communities don’t just spring up – there has to be something immediately valuable to users in order for them to take hold, Schadler said… before a Zune user can share music, they have to find a friend who also owns a Zune player. ‘That’s going to be a slow transition,’ said Shawny Chen, a research analyst for Current Analysis. She expects Zune to win over some consumers but doesn’t expect it to attract a huge following this season.”
Full article here.
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