David Emery OnlineHow about something that rhymes with dune?
28 July 2006
Almost the only thing of note that happened whilst I was away was the announcement of the “Zune” by Microsoft.
Just don’t call it a iPod killer, whatever you do.
I think this move may be one of the most public displays of corporate fear I’ve ever seen. They’ve been trying to compete with the iPod almost since it came out, and have utterly failed at every turn. So they’ve decided to simply copy it, and add some fairly useless features. When I say copy it, though, I really mean it – down to the music store integration, and single vendor-ness. More on that latter, but first I’ll focus on the “new” features.
Why would I want Wi-Fi on my iPod Zune? How is that not going to eat battery life? I’ve never seen the point in it whenever it’s been rumoured for the iPod – unless they can figure out charging over Wi-Fi (then I’d be impressed!) then there’s no need for syncing over Wi-Fi as you do that when you charge. Social sharing of tracks and playlists to nearby Zune users? Why would you want to do that? And how does that fit with the DRM of their music store?
Talking of their music store, another rumoured feature is that they’re going to scan your iTunes Music Store music and give it to you for free, so you can use it with your Zune. Now, this sounds great until you realise that the Zune store will almost certainly be subscription based (and hence fail – people like owning things, but that’s a different discussion) and so really they’re not giving you anything; it’s just a nice feature of their player software.
Back to the vendor lock in. Almost the only valid criticism Apple gets surrounding it’s music store is that you can only play the downloaded songs on an iPod, and also the reverse – you can only play DRM’d songs on the iPod that comes from the Apple store. This is the major advantage that “PlaysForSure”, Microsoft’s DRM system has – there are multiple stores selling PlaysForSure encoded songs, and quite a few players that support it.
So the Zune supports PlaysForSure, and all those stores, and all the tracks you’ve already bought, doesn’t it?
Nope.
The Zune apparently uses a new DRM system, of which it will be the only device that can read, and the Zune store will be the only store selling. It won’t even play PlaysForSure tracks.
Quite why Microsoft have squandered their only advantage, I really don’t know. The only thing I can think of is that they were trying to copy Apple as closely as possible. Of course, if you look at the pictures of the Zune floating around the net, you’ll notice they’ve haven’t managed to copy the most important thing: the Zune is ugly.
I’ll leave you with this to ponder over: The people behind the Zune are the same people that developed the Xbox. The Xbox is widely considered as the most successful Microsoft project in recent times. In the period 2001-2005, the Xbox project lost Microsoft approximately $4 billion – and that’s a successful Microsoft project…