The picture was shot by MacDailyNews reader Larry Fransson on December 29, 2006 at a Costco store in Tukwila, WA (a suburb south of Seattle):
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Yah, its that way because if my zune watching experience holds true, the Zune were all sold out, and the retailer was putting the ipods atop the zone display in an attempt to confuse retail shoppers that the iPod are as good as a zune.
Now, there’s a real example of a M$oft fanboy. With less than 2% market share, he thinks the Zune was sold out. 🙂
http://www.dvorak.org/blog/?p=8762
something can be sold out in 1 store without having a massive market share. example: store has 2 zunes and a million ipods in stock with no other mp3 players. store sells 750,000 ipods and 2 zunes. store has sold out of zunes but ipod has 99.73% share of total sales.
i hope this example is simple enough for you to understand.
I bow before you GregA, the master of spin!
This is as hilarious as it is poignant.
The Zune was guaranteed DOA, and fulfilled that prophecy even more than expected. Have fun with it while you can GregA, because it as well as support for it will soon disappear.
Both of you make good points. I know M$ did NOT go into any store in a small way. They made sure they always have stock and then some.
The very few stores in my town that carry them got huge shippments but after 4 or 5 weeks of no sales the prescious display space was used for something else. And not ipods or even mp3 players. I think it reflects bad management to leave the zune table covering on that table.
I will say the zune to zune transfers are very sweet. that said, i think there are several mp3 players that i like better. So when apple started there were many mp3 players and it was just the best. i had 4 mp3 players before my gen2 ipod. And now i think what has happened is that although there are many mp3 players in the market similar to when apple launched the ipod, the zune though very good is not the best.
so will zune market share grow? yes for sure. Will it dominate that space? i think it can NOT do that. i know MS wants to dominate in any area it enters but i think it can not in this space. though it does dominate in many other areas. And i think unless they get to 5 or 6% of the mp3 market they do stand a chance of abandoning the market for concern of a reverse halo effect.
Both players are very good.
Touting these gizmos as flagships or posterboys of some way of life, and using them to spike even further the rivalry between M$ and Apple is just idiotic. The Zune is not even made by M$… It’s designed and built by Toshiba. And M$ knows that putting the foot on the door is better than stay shut outside. The Zune never intended to go head to head against the iPod. It’s there to grab 2% of the pie, if ever. Given the M$ deep pockets, it can afford to churn out dud after dud till some minor competitor company goes under, and then another… M$ can afford to keep competing at a loss till it a) makes a real groovy player, or b) the rest of the competition goes away…
People said pretty much the same of the original Xbox… now they praise the 360 as the best thing since sliced bread…Had M$ never entered the market, they’d be clueless to produce the 360. Perseverance goes a long way… I wouldn’t dismiss the Zune right away, and, in fact might become a prized piece of memorabilia in 20 years time, selling in ebay for a fortune…
The Costco I go to doesn’t even sell Zunes.
Target does, but the Zunes don’t seem to be selling very well. I watched while waiting on my wife to buy blinds for the apartment. People look at the Zune, like the larger screen, but buy iPods instead.
What’s a Zune?
California is using the Zune as a ‘road dot’ in ski country where they are torn off by the show plows every night. I guess they are less valuable that the bit’s of plastic they usually use..
Now you can say, ” The Zune has 100% of the ‘road dot’ market share!!
The sunday paper flyer for my local best buy advertised every player EXCEPT Zune today! Sansa & iPods took two full pages….no mention of Zune at all.
That says something…..
/irony
Whats an ipod?
We are all MS here but have two 60Gb Video Ipods. Do we have any interest in the Zune? Nope, zero.
Dying Zune
I’m selling unique Zune holders on EBay. It is a small box of kitty litter for the brown one.
I’m searching for good deals on Zune. If it’s doing so bad, I wonder if I can have 3 for the price of one, or a heavily discounted one…
My friend bought a Nano 4Gb last May, for 250 euros, but now he’s got a new nokia phone with mp3 player and He’s thinking of selling it for 120 euros. I still think it’s too much. But He wont sell it for 75. So if I can find a Zune for, brand new for 75 to 100 bucks… I’ll take it.
Happy New Year 2007
“People said pretty much the same of the original Xbox… now they praise the 360 as the best thing since sliced bread…Had M$ never entered the market, they’d be clueless to produce the 360. ”
Actually the 360 is kinda mediocre. It brings nothing new to the table, it’s just an improvement, nothing much new. Same with the PS3. Sales figures and reviews show which is the best console out of the next gen consoles: the Wii.
There is also the thing that people forget when they make remarks like that. Consoles aren’t like MP3 players. There are effectively 3 consoles manufacturers at there and they release new models every 4 years or so. There are many MP3 player manufacturers and they release new models every few months. While MS can release wireless technology now, it isn’t like the console market where they’ll have had that advantage for a few years, they’ll have it for a few months before other companies come out with more capable players.
the Zune is an iPod wannabe, except for one thing – the WiFi, and they crippled that. maybe they will roll out more features with firmware upgrades, but that is the exact opposite of what they should have done. the Zune! its a music store! its a VoIP phone! it’s a Slingbox client! its a podcast aggregator! its a YouTube viewer!
all of which could be done on the Zune hardware, but weren’t. all of which would have created some major buzz and sent Zune sales spiking early on. people would be talking about how the design of the iPod line has stagnated. no WiFi. no Bluetooth. no widescreen. suddenly, MS has leapfrogged the iPod in terms of design.
emphasizing the WiFi as a way to share music (1) just points out the DRM restrictions on that lame feature; and (2) is not much of a selling point unless and until there are a lot of Zunes in circulation.
#19
That’s why I won’t dismiss the hardware right away.
Let’s hope some Hacker will come up with a groovy firmware, out from the open-source community. The Zune it’s a winner that way… hey, they did it on the Linksys routers, so why not the Zune…And would also be a poetic justice message from the open source community to M$…
Any takers?
First off maybe if one of you owned a Zune and an iPod and actually compared the two youd probably throw your piece of shit iPod out. Big deal the Zune has only 30 gigs of storage space, but OMG microsoft owns, what?, 25% of apple and has incorporated the same hard drive that the iPod has in the ZUNE!. Meaning if your a smart guy like I am and you put two and two together, you can take the drive from the iPod out, and put it into the zune making it an 80 gig Zune. And no there isnt a special drive key like the 360 has so dont worry about hacking the key not needed. Just plug it in and play. With a much better screen, wireless capabilities, and easy navigation, Out of the box anyway the zune blows the iPod out of the water, thats just a little tid bit of info for all of you modders out there. Best Buy didnt put it into there advertising flyer because, right now the Sansa’s and iPod’s are the top sellers, they,ve been out for a while. The Zune is new. Either that or they didnt put it in to false garuntee the zune shipments, sorta like the Nintendo Wii. My suggestion is buy a zune play with it, if you dont like it, go back to your iJokes.