The Motley Fool: Apple makes Microsoft’s Zune a paperweight

19 years ago

“When I purchased a (brown!) Microsoft Zune about a month ago, I figured I was getting a couple of things. For one, a pretty decent media player, with a few key features iPod lacked: a prettier user interface, a subscription music model, and a bigger screen,” Seth Jayson writes for The Motley Fool. “For another thing, I assumed I was getting a potential collectors’ item — something along the lines of an Edsel.”

Jayson writes, “But I didn’t realize just how quickly the Zune would be made into a paperweight. It only took about a month, as it turns out. Steve Jobs did it yesterday, with his unveiling of the latest Apple iPod.”

“He didn’t unveil an iPod yesterday, you say? I beg to differ,” Jayson writes. “Sure, the product he showed off was a phone, something so expensive and so limited in capacity that it won’t — can’t — have the same traction as the iPod. But it’s pretty clear what the next generation of iPods can (and likely will) be.”

Jayson writes, “Apple simply needs to tear out the pricey phone guts, thicken the form factor to accommodate the greater storage capacity of miniature hard drives, and bam, the Zune has no advantages left. The iPod’s screen will be bigger, its user interface will be prettier, and if Apple leaves that Wi-Fi chip inside, it can easily enable player-to-player file-sharing and hotspot downloads, killing the Zune’s alleged ‘social’ advantage. This also makes an instant relic out of SanDisk’s latest Wi-Fi enabled Sansa Connect model.”

“Apple gets the details right from the beginning. Jobs and his designers know that very small annoyances add up to very big headaches, so they eliminate as many hassles as possible,” Jayson writes. “The Zune is typical Microsoft: some interesting ideas for improvement lost, because the people making the device didn’t think things through all the way.”

Jayson writes, “There’s a side of me, as a Microsoft shareholder, that hopes Microsoft sticks a fork in the Zune right now and admits that it’s done. Stop wasting money on this initiative. You’re late to the game, and you brought out a nice device with some good, new features, but you blew it on the details. Meanwhile, Apple has jumped another two years ahead with its latest offering. Admit you’re beaten… Besides, the sooner the Zune disappears, the sooner I can hawk it as a collector’s item on eBay. Let’s hope it gets me enough for a snazzy new iPod.”

Full article here.
Microsoft (and everyone else) is more than just two years behind. Apple has over 200 patents on iPhone – and therefore on future iPods and other future devices – and they plan to defend those patents vigorously. Sorry, Microsoft et al. no copying this time! As for Zune, it was a paperweight on the day of release, no help from Apple needed.

Microsoft’s Zune selling like snotcakes – November 15, 2006
Dvorak: ‘If anything is doomed to failure, it’s Microsoft’s Zune’ – November 14, 2006
Opinion: More blood on Apple iPod’s Click Wheel: Microsoft pulls plug on Zune – July 25, 2006