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December 12, 2006
Microsoft Concedes Zune is Struggling
It's hard not to read into the following bit of news that Microsoft's Zune music player is struggling:To tout its Zune, Microsoft launched a marketing campaign on par with that for the original Xbox. But now that the music player has spent a month on the market, the company is considering increasing its advertising to attract more attention to it.
"We are talking about upping that spend a little more," Marketing Director Jason Reindorp told CNET News.com last week.
Ad spending is up, people can't find other Zune users, and the device is itself has now fallen out of the top ten all the way to spot #65 on Amazon's top sellers list of electronics.
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I think their chances are quite good. Like the original Xbox, the Zune is largely an off the shelf product (Toshiba). But they did lay the groundwork with Xbox on the software side (Live). Likewise the software on Zune has had a good response. It's quite a bit better than other interfaces. The problems lie with the hardware. On V2 I expect them to get the obvious problems with Zune fixed. There's been so much commentary on it, it would be hard for Microsoft to not know what needs to be fixed.
And I for one hope it turns out well. I find my iPod infuriating. It's god awfully slow to load songs and iTunes is just a bug infested piece of molasses on my Windows box.
Currently #17 on Amazon's list of MP3 players (the more relevant data point). Pretty clearly, they blew the intro via insufficient advertising and more importantly insufficient software functionaility especially wrt WIFI. But if they get the missing software updates out the door asap and then increase marketing, they have a chance to be a viable #2. No one is going to knock off the Ipod immediately.
Notice a pattern with Microsoft?
They are going after entrenched winners like iPod and Google, and their tactic is that of someone with a leading product.
Advertise more.
This is not going to help Zune. Nor does it help MSFT Live.com search against Google.
Xbox, maybe they could get to parity doing that, and maybe the investment was worth it, but it doesn't seem like a good model for most consumer tech products.
Product matters, and consumers don't want to wait for version 3 to have an acceptable experience.
But Microsoft seemingly just wields a hammer...