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May 9, 2008

rivals

Zune hits 2m sales, still way, way short of iPod sales

Posted May. 9, ’08, 2:22 PM PT by David Dahlquist
Category | Apple » Rivals

zune-vs-ipod-g.jpg (JPEG Image, 500x430 pixels)-1.jpgMicrosoft revealed that it has sold two million of their funny little Zune players since their launch in November ‘06. This shows a relatively flat growth, and a small gain in their overall US marketshare from three, to a whopping four percent. Great job, boys. Have a coffee break.

Apple, in the meantime, has sold 10.6 million iPods in its latest quarter. If one does the math, that means that Apple has moved more than five times the amount of MP3 players in the last quarter than Microsoft has moved in the last year and a half. Coffee break’s over, boys; time to learn how to innovate.

I still don’t understand how such an insanely wealthy company like Microsoft can’t seem to innovate half as well as Apple. You’d think that having billions of dollars to pour into R&D for something as simple as an MP3 player would result in a superior product, but leave it to Microsoft to fail miserably.


12 Comments

Anonymous said:

they could rename it 'The Monkey' and include a video of Balmer dancing

May 9, 2008 3:38 PM
Non-techie Seattleite said:

As a new seattle local, I cannot feel sorry for the incredibly bright folks I meet who work for Mr. Softy. I wish they could create a better product...I like these folks, but their output is amazingly terrible. What gives?

May 9, 2008 6:03 PM
Anonymous2 said:

So the Zune only has 4% of the marketshare for MP3 players and is therefore a product that has "failed miserably." Macs also have only a small portion of their market (an estimated ~6% as reported here less than a month ago) but are "insanely great." I guess it doesn't make sense to equate market share to product quality.

Maybe the Zune is a "niche product", just like Macs or to trot out the car analogy, like a BMW or Lexus. Or perhaps like a Yugo.

May 9, 2008 8:04 PM
Eric said:

Perhaps the reason they can't produce a player as popular as the ipod is the same reason that Apple doesn't dominate the computer world despite it having a significantly better OS than windows: Momentum.

Ipods are so entrenched in the marketplace (with good reason), and it's hard to displace a front runner, no matter how good the Zune may be (I've never used one, so I don't actually know).

May 10, 2008 1:43 AM
Anonymous said:

What is the ratio of the important stuff? Windows OSes sold -vs- Mac OSs sold?

May 10, 2008 9:32 AM
Anonymous said:

On the other hand, Apple just announced the sale of 2M copies of Leopard; Microsoft annouced the sale of 140M copies of Vista.

May 10, 2008 2:01 PM
Anonymous said:

2 million people could have bought 2 million iPods without zunes.

May 10, 2008 3:26 PM
David Dahlquist said:

Yes, I'm aware that Microsoft has a much larger market share than Apple for its OS. The point I was making is that with so much money to pour into a new product, one would think Microsoft would be able to launch a more effective marketing campaign and a more appealing product.

An example would be a giant company like Sony, who'd never touched video games before, but were able to come out with a great product like the Playstation and totally change the gaming landscape. Momentum was not on their side, since Nintendo and Sega were firmly entrenched in the gaming market, but they were able to use great marketing and innovation to take a huge chunk of the market. That's something Microsoft should have been able to do with the Zune considering their vast wealth and IT dominance, but have failed.

And don't even get me started on Vista...

May 10, 2008 4:17 PM
Lesser Whark said:

Anonymous, you're comparing over a year's cumulative Vista sales against the first weekend of Leopard sales. Admittedly, it's hard to compare anything else.

http://apple20.blogs.fortune.cnn.com/2008/05/08/140-million-copies-of-vista-sold-how-does-leopard-compare

May 11, 2008 5:42 AM
mediaspecLM Author Profile Page said:

It's interesting how the people bashing the Mac OS and its progeny only seem to post anonymously.

I'm not saying the MacOS is perfect, since it does have a few flaws here and there, but it's vastly easier to use than the alternatives.

Before you jump all over me, I HAVE used the alternatives fairly extensively for the past 18 years or so. Mac OS really hit its stride when OS X was released. As nice as they were, the OSes before that did have some issues.

To bring this post back to the Zune, though, I've had opportunity to fiddle with the Zune, and found the interface to be somewhat difficult to use. Even my dyed-in-the-wool Windows supporting friends prefer iPods to Zunes. Of course, this is simply anecdotal support from one person, but the numbers of users of each platform "in the wild" seem to bear this position out.

I think the discussion is made a lot more meaningful when the argument(s) can be about the strengths and weaknesses of the respective OSes instead of the knee-jerk reaction of MacOS vs Windows.

May 11, 2008 3:13 PM
ZuneMeThisZuneMeThat said:

Compare Ballmer and Jobs side by side. Then compare Zune and iPod side by side. No competition.

May 12, 2008 8:57 AM
Isaac said:

Zune is a superior product. Try one, it's menu system is way better than iPods. I guess the newer iPods are bett, but Zune beats my 5th generation iPod by a mile.

May 20, 2008 10:23 AM

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