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News
Microsoft Confirms Music Player Plans
Thursday, July 20th, 2006 at 3:00 PM - by Brad Cook
In an exclusive interview with Billboard Magazine, which will publish the news in its July 29 edition, Microsoft's Chris Stephenson confirmed that the company plans to launch a portable music player, along with an iTunes-like service, under the name Zune.
Mr. Stephenson, who is Microsoft's new general manager of marketing for the MSN Entertainment Business, told Billboard that Zune "is the company's strongest effort yet to rein in Apple Computer's iTunes/iPod juggernaut, currently responsible for about 70% of the digital music market and 75% of the portable digital music player market," according to the Wall Street Journal (subscription required).
As previously rumored, Zune will be a self-contained system similar to iPod+iTunes, meaning that Microsoft will move away from the Windows Media ecosystem that licensed the technology to a variety of hardware makers and online music stores, only to see consumer confusion result.
The Wall Street Journal noted: "The ecosystem strategy worked brilliantly in PCs. But in music, instead of turning Microsoft's technology into the industry standard, the strategy has confused consumers with scores of different devices and services under different brand names that haven't always worked well together."
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