Will Zune give Apple nightmares?
p2pnet.net News:- Bill and the Boyz hope their coming Zune music machine will drive Apple’s iPod into the dust and, “Apple fans point and laugh at Microsoft’s entry into a market totally dominated by the iPod and its transcendent design,” says MacWorld UK.
“Apple’s media players are so good they have transformed consumer electronics, inspired a massive gadget ‘ecosystem’ and spawned a thousand imitators. Every pretender to the media player throne – and there have been hundreds – has been thoroughly smacked down by Apple and its untouchable iPod.”
And Gadgetell believes why is the Zune is making Steve & Co to, “stay late at work and then have nightmares throughout the night for five reasons”.
Both stories, and several others, are quoting the Raw Feed’s Mike Elgan, as featured in Computerworld.
Here’s what Elgan has to say:
1. Microsoft is hatching a consumer media “perfect storm.”
Zune will be supported and promoted and will leverage the collective power of Windows XP, Windows Vista, Soapbox (Microsoft’s new “YouTube killer”) and the Xbox 360. The Zune interface is just like a miniature version of the Windows Media Center user interface and is very similar to some elements of Vista.
The Zune will plug directly into the Xbox via a standard Universal Serial Bus cable — a fact Microsoft will drill into the heads of Xbox users on the Xbox Live online gaming service. The Zune Marketplace will be integrated with, and promoted by, the Xbox Live Marketplace.
2. The Zune is social and viral.
Since the iPod first came out, times have changed. The rise of social networks like MySpace.com and viral Web 2.0 sites like that of YouTube Inc. have transformed the expectations of young people about sharing and using media. In the context of these trends, Apple is old school. But the Zune, with its peer-to-peer wireless file sharing, is both social and viral. The Zune isn’t just a solitary music player. Think of it as a portable, wireless, hardware version of MySpace.
3. Zune may have more programming.
While Apple launched its movie business with movies from Disney (where Apple CEO Steve Jobs sits on the board), Microsoft has already lined up Twentieth Century Fox Film Corp., Paramount Pictuers, Sony Pictures Entertainment, Universal Pictures, Warner Bros., Lions Gate Entertainment Corp. and MGM Pictures. For TV shows, Microsoft will offer programs from A&E, Animal Planet, the BBC, The Biography Channel, Cartoon Network, CBS, Comedy Central, Discovery Channel, Discovery Health Channel, Discovery Kids, E Entertainment Television, Fine Living TV Network, Fox, Fuel TV, FX, HGTV, The History Channel, MTV, Nickelodeon, Nick at Nite, PBS, Speed, Spike, Travel Channel, TV Land, VH1 and others.
4. Zune’s screen is better for movies.
The Zune’s screen is just as good – and larger than the iPod’s. More importantly, it can be turned sideways for a wide-screen movie experience.
5. Zune is actually pretty cool.
The Zune is unlike any product Microsoft has ever shipped. It’s actually very nicely designed, surprisingly minimalist and (dare I say it?) “cool.”
The iPod is the soul of Apple’s entire business. Apple has been relatively successful at winning converts from Windows to Mac OS X, for example, in part because its whole product line basks in the glow of iPod’s success, hipness and ubiquity. Apple has recently and preemptively lowered the price of iPods, announced an iTV set-top box — which will ship later than Vista — and is probably working feverishly on a bigger-screen, wirelessly enabled iPod.
Will this be enough to surmount the fact Zune is loaded with shotgun DRM that riddles everything?
As Bill Thompson points out, Bill and the Boyz have decided that you’ll only be able to listen to a transferred song three times and after three days, “you won’t be able to play it at all”. He goes on:
“They can do this thanks to copy protection code built in to the player, whether or not the songs themselves have been protected using a digital rights management system.
“And they will apply the limit to every song or audio file that you transfer, with no check to see if the songs themselves are in copyright or protected. They will even lock songs that are released under a Creative Commons licence that explicitly allows sharing and copying.”
Stay tuned.
Also See:
MacWorld UK – Why Microsoft’s Zune scares Apple to the core, October 2, 2006
Gadgetell – 5 reasons the Zune is causing Apple to have nightmares, October 2, 2006
Computerworld – Why Microsoft’s Zune scares Apple to the core, September 28, 2006
points out – Zune, CC and awkward questions, September 29, 2006
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October 3rd, 2006 at 8:34 pm
The corporate-cool Zune will become the darling of IT departments who will force corporate secretaries to use it to record the meeting’s minutes.
October 3rd, 2006 at 8:36 pm
Ha ha ha! Yes! The Zune has “corporate-cool” written all over it. Microsoft should be very satisfied with this corporate achievement.