In my previous article about Microsoft’s latest attempt to catch up to the iPod, no pricing, ship date or official dimensions were available. Since then, more concrete details have become available. First off, Microsoft has finalized the price for their 30GB POS device: $249.99 US. That’s just 99¢ more than the equivalent capacity iPod. The device will go on sale on November 14.
Zune Marketplace will sell music for 79 Microsoft points per track, which works out to 98.75¢, since 80 Microsoft points will cost you a buck. So for all intents and purposes, songs are the same price as they are on Apple’s iTunes Store (99¢). There will also be an all you can eat subscription service for $14.99/month. This is more expensive than some of the PlaysForSure subscription services available from other vendors. Microsoft Marketplace will launch with only music for sale. Video will come down the road.
The shipping Zune player is considerably bigger than I had estimated based on the publicity photos previously released. Of course, any time you have to estimate, you’re bound to be off a tad, not to mention publicity photos could be misleading. My guess was that the device would be between the size of an iPod 30GB and iPod 80GB. The reality is it’s bigger than even the 80GB iPod, so owners of that wonderful device can still brag they have 50GB more storage AND a smaller device. The actual dimensions are 4.4 inches x 2.4 inches x 0.58 inch with a weight of 5.6 ounces. That makes it 13% bigger/2% heavier than the iPod 80GB, and 45% bigger/30% heavier than iPod 30GB it’s trying to compete directly with.
So all that extra bulk must be for a bigger battery that will beat the iPod’s battery life, right? Wrong. According to Engadget:
They were pretty tight lipped about it, but our new pal and independent analyst for Directions on Microsoft, Matt Rosoff, let us know that according to his contacts, with wireless off we can expect a 12 hours of music playback at 128Kbps, 3.5 hours for video playback, and 4.5 hours when running a slide show. Compare that to the 30GB iPod’s 14/4 hours and the 80GB iPod’s 20/6 hours, and it’s a little difficult to fully envision the payoff for that added thickness and height.
So iPod 80GB owners can also brag they have nearly double the battery life of the Zune as well. We can only imagine what the battery must be like with WiFi turned on.
Does Microsoft really think people will buy a bigger, uglier device that has worse battery life JUST because it has a bigger screen and gimmicky WiFi that is next to useless? Anyone serious about video is going to prefer the higher capacity and longer battery life of the 80GB iPod, and the casual video user will really notice how much smaller/lighter the iPod 30GB model is. Microsoft is going to learn a hard lesson from the Zune this holiday shopping season. But hey, they have to spend that cash hoard on something, nothing says it has to be successful. One thing is obvious: the Zune isn’t even fit to compete against other products on the market from the likes of Creative and iRiver, against the iPod it’s DOA.
[Edit 10/3/2006, 11:18 am: Changed "for all intensive purposes" to "for all intents and purposes". Thanks to reader "Poppycock" for catching that error.]
October 2nd, 2006
Microsoft finally went all official on some Zune details today, confirming many of the rumors that have been floating around the ‘net for a while now. The photos that were leaked weeks ago and confirmed from an FCC filing made by Toshiba were the real deal. As rumored, the first Zune device will have a 30GB hard disk, 3-inch colour screen and Wi-Fi wireless connectivity for music sharing. It will be available in three colours: white, black and brown. There will also be an accompanying online media store called Zune Marketplace and Zune media player software. Zune will supposedly go on sale this holiday season, but no price or release dates were revealed. Rumors pegged the price of the device at $299 US. We’ll have to wait to find out whether that is accurate.
So how big is it? While Microsoft hasn’t released any physical dimensions for the Zune, it’s easy enough to extrapolate the length and width using the screen size as a reference. The Zune’s screen is 3″ (7.6 cm) measured diagonally. Based on the hi-resolution photos Microsoft has released, that would make it 4.3″ (10.9 cm) long by 2.3″ (5.8 cm) wide. Discerning the device’s thickness is much more difficult due to the lack of any photo of the device’s profile, and the fact that it has a bevelled edge.The only photo we have to go by is a three-quarter view lifestyle shot. Our best guess, based on extrapolation of scale, is the unit will be about 0.5″ (13 mm) thick. So it’s slightly longer, narrower and thicker than the 30GB 5G iPod. Overall, the Zune is about 16% larger in volume than the same capacity 30GB iPod but 8.5% smaller than the 80GB iPod.
The Zune doesn’t have a scroll wheel like the iPod. That round scroll-wheel looking control is really only a 4-way navigation button. Once again Microsoft demonstrates it isn’t above making their technologically inferior user interface look like the technology leader’s. I’m sure it will fool a few unsuspecting customers though. I can only imagine how fun it will be scrolling through a library of thousands of songs with a fixed speed button. The Zune also appears to have some sort of proprietary dock connector on it’s bottom edge, no doubt in an attempt to encourage third party development of connectible accessories as the iPod’s dock connector has.
From a file format perspective, the Zune supports pretty much all the same formats the iPod does, but adds WMA and WMV formats (of course). At least Microsoft is being somewhat realistic about acknowledging that they have lost the format war in the portable space. There’s a reason they’re called PodCasts after all, and iTunes rips CDs to industry standard AAC format, so Microsoft is obviously going after current iPod/iTunes users by supporting the formats they already have. Strangely however, Microsoft has decided to not support Mac users, so for now, Mac owning iPod/iTunes users will remain out of Microsoft’s reach. Maybe Microsoft felt it would be futile to try to convert users who are already familiar with more than one of Apple’s superior products. So Microsoft is going to concentrate on the rest of users who don’t know any better (yet), only there’s one problem: people who already own an iPod, have already made a conscious decision to not use a Microsoft infested product. What’s the likelihood that they are going to switch BACK? Is the Zune that much better?
The answer to that question is NO. The Zune amounts to a cheap knockoff of the iPod, with a gimmicky feature (Wi-Fi), a cheap plastic case and a bigger screen. No scroll wheel. No iTunes. No 80GB model. On top of that, Wi-Fi and a bigger screen are going to put additional load on the battery, so expect to see lower battery life on the Zune, but I assume Microsoft will play with the numbers to make it look like the battery life is as good or better. This is easily done by measuring battery life while playing files encoded with unrealistically low bitrates to reduce the CPU workload. At least that’s what many PlaysForSure device vendors do. Price-wise, I fully expect Microsoft to bite the bullet and offer the Zune for the same price as the 30GB iPod ($249 US), although rumors had pegged the price at $299 US, which coincidentally was what the 30GB iPod used to sell for. Microsoft will be happy to lose money on this product for years to come, just as they do in many other markets.
So with the bigger screen and no doubt lower battery life being a wash, the only thing going for the Zune is the FM tuner and Wi-Fi social networking experiment. The total dominance of the iPod has pretty much proved that the majority of customers aren’t interested in listening to static-filled FM signals. I’m sure some über-geeks and teenagers are going to thing Wi-Fi is a neat idea, but in practice, how much are people really interested in listening to other people’s music? When people listen to an iPod, they want to switch off from the world or entertain themselves while they do something else by themself. It’s an anti-social activity, and try as they might, Microsoft is not going to be successful in turning it into a social one. Not to mention this music sharing feature only works with other Zunes. How often are people going to run into someone else with one?
The most likely scenario for Zune’s Wi-Fi sharing is teenage friends who hang out together at school or wherever, but they have already shared their music libraries a long time ago via their computers. From the looks of it, the sharing will only work for music purchased from the Zune Marketplace, as it will require DRM to limit sampling to 3 listens over 3 days. Microsoft would come under the wrath of the RIAA if they allowed unprotected music to be transferred at will. So kids and teenagers will have no use for it, since they don’t buy a lot of music and Adults won’t have any use for it because they have better things to do with their time and it will more than likely just confuse them like the advanced features on their cell phones.
Let’s face it, Zune is no iPod killer. It isn’t even an iPod annoyer. In fact, the only chance Microsoft has of making a market for the Zune is to integrate it closely with their XBox 360 console and add Zune Marketplace to the XBox Live online service. At least then it will offer something tangible to a select market: people who own an XBox 360 but don’t own a computer. They won’t take over the digital music market with that strategy, but they could move a few thousand units to die hard XBox 360 fans. Zune is just another product from Microsoft that proves they have no creativity or scruples. There are dozens of media players out there that are better than the Zune, and that’s before we consider the iPod. Microsoft has stabbed every one of their PlaysForSure partners in the back with the Zune, and this will come back to haunt them one day.
Microsoft has also sent mixed signals with their Zune strategy. First, they were all about giving consumers choice, and now it’s about no choice, since Zune won’t play nice with PlaysForSure or Macs. In a recent interview with Engadget, MS Corporate VP J Allard had some interesting things to say about PlaysForSure:
Engadget: So up until this point Microsoft’s digital music strategy has been largely to create an ecosystem and be a supplier of a DRM platform to manufacturers and online music stores. PlaysForSure was the thrust of Microsoft’s strategy until the announcement of the Zune. How does PlaysForSure fit into Microsoft’s strategy going forward? It doesn’t appear that the Zune will be compatible with any PlaysForSure retailers. How does that affect Microsoft’s current partners who rely on PlaysForSure?
I think there’s two answers to the question. First answer is, this whole digital music revolution is really just starting. There’s still a lot to be figured. We certainly don’t think we have it all figured out, and we think there will be change. The second thing is that specifically when it comes to PlaysForSure, think about you might buy a Windows PC versus how my mother might buy a Windows PC. My mom calls up Dell and says, “I have seven hundred bucks, get me a computer. What’s the best thing I can get?” She doesn’t specify the keyboard, the monitor, the memory configuration. The conversation might get as specific as, “Do you think you want to burn DVDs?” Then she gets a product that shows up and it’s all pre-installed.
There are other people that go to Fry’s Electronics and hand pick the graphics card, the case for their computer, they build a Windows-based PC from the ground up. We have a solution for both of those things. We at Microsoft have a platform that is Windows, we have a solution for the crowd of consumers that are very deliberate about how they build their PC solution, and we also have a solution for people who just want turnkey. And I think that’s how these two strategies complement each other. The PlaysForSure is still a program we’re going to invest in, we still have a lot of partners there, and for a class of consumers who that want to have a hand-crafted media media experience and maximize their choice, we have an answer. There’s another class of consumers that just want to get digital media, and they just want to be able to go to one store and have it all just plain, dead simple, and don’t want to know what a codec is.
Engadget: Wasn’t that the point of PlaysForSure?
Well, it’s like asking a question about Windows — and the point of Windows was to bring personal computing to the world — some people are going to pick their PCs, they’re going to pick their monitor, they’re going to pick their printer, they’re going to pick their graphics card, and combine the things that they’ve chosen. Other people just a want a system that’s end-to-end — all compatible out of the gate — and that’s what Zune does. Zune says there is no choice; you get a Zune device, you hook it up to the Zune service, and it just works.
Engadget: When PlaysForSure was introduced, the premise was, we make it simple so that you don’t have to worry about whether your player works with the music you’re purchasing…
That continues to be the premise for devices that are branded in that category, and we think that we’ve clearly done a lot in that program, where there’s a lot of devices out there, there are a lot of services out there, there are a lot of partners, and there are a lot of satisfied customers. We like that program. We’ve also found that there’s a category of customers that say, “Give me a brand experience, advertise it to me on television; I want to be part of the digital music revolution, and that solution [PlaysForSure] doesn’t work for me.” So they’re two complementary solutions — not everyones gonna want Zune and not everyone’s gonna want PlaysForSure. They’re different paths there, and we’re okay with both of them.
Spoken like a Politician. I’m sure your PlaysForSure hardware and online store partners are okay with both strategies too Mr. Allard. 
What I’d like to know is who are all these people who are asking for a brand experience? People buy the iPod because it just works and works damn well. They don’t buy them because they are craving a brand experience and want it to be advertised to them on TV. Sure, the advertising may be part of the reason they decide to buy an iPod, but that’s not the same as people asking to be advertised to, and in a way that’s insulting to the people who Microsoft is targeting with the Zune.
Allard and Microsoft can dance around it all they want, but the truth is they are getting their asses handed to them on a plate by a company that they are used to beating. Their strategy for the last 5 years, including PlaysForSure, has failed to stop the Apple juggernaut. So what does Microsoft do? They fall back on what HAS worked for them in the past: copying Apple as closely as they can. Only Apple has already won, and people don’t want what Microsoft is offering anymore. Zune will contribute to Microsoft’s failure, as consumers get even more confused by the alternatives to the iPod and Microsoft’s partners start to turn against them in a desperate attempt to hold onto what little market share they still have–Apple really should be thanking Microsoft for making it so damn easy to kick their ass.
September 15th, 2006