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Ballmer: Zune Can Take iPod

Wednesday, November 15th, 2006 at 11:20 AM - by

Microsoft's CEO Steve Ballmer thinks the Zune media player can knock Apple's iPod out of it's dominant position. He commented "We can beat them, but it's not going to be easy," in a Washington Post interview.

Microsoft's handheld MP3 and video player went on sale on November 14. The company is hyping that by offering some features that are similar to Apple's 30GB video capable iPod, and touting the Zune as a "social experience" device, it can take on the iPod where other companies have failed.

Mr. Ballmer said "The market will have two big players for a long time, us and Apple. Obviously we're the David in this one; Apple's the Goliath." Microsoft is also hoping to capitalize on iPod and other MP3 player owners that are unhappy with Apple's market dominance.

Microsoft is working to buy friends in the recording industry, too. Last week, the company announced a deal that gives Universal Music Group a cut from every Zune sold. Now Microsoft is offering to sign similar deals with other labels.

The road to the iPod's dethroning, however, may be more difficult than Microsoft would like. So far, the Zune is getting panned in reviews from industry experts like David Pogue. And since those reviews are likely to keep many consumers from purchasing the player, the Zune may be the David in Goliath's shadow for a long time.

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stuartea said:

member since 08 Aug 2005 with 327 posts, unranked, send him a message or view his profile

Wed Nov 15, 2006 12:55 pm

David in Goliath's shadow? shouldn't that be the Goliath in a slightler taller than usual David's shadow? : )

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brett_x said:

member since 24 Jan 2006 with 322 posts, unranked, send him a message or view his profile

Wed Nov 15, 2006 1:06 pm

Article wrote:
Microsoft is also hoping to capitalize on iPod and other MP3 player owners that are unhappy with Apple's market dominance.

Somehow I doubt that people would turn to Microsoft to alleviate their discontent with a particular company's dominance in a market. They might by a Zune for other reasons, but that won't be one of them.

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jredmon said:

member since 15 Nov 2006 with 1 posts, unranked, send him a message or view his profile

Wed Nov 15, 2006 1:15 pm

I think Ballmer's analogy is actually a poor one. In a real sense, the roles should be reversed. Microsoft( larger, monopoly, more money, should win) is the Goliath ( bigger, stronger, should win) vs. Apple (smaller, less money, shouldn't win) is David(smaller, apparently weaker, shouldn't win). However, I will excited when the day comes that Apple put the slingstone between Microsoft's eyes and then cuts off it's head with it's own sword.

Just an observation.

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the wedge said:

member since 10 May 2006 with 15 posts, unranked, send him a message or view his profile

Wed Nov 15, 2006 1:19 pm

I messed with the Zune for about 20 minutes at Best Buy. I don't know if they had poorly compressed video loaded or the playback on the Zune is just that crappy. Lots of ghosts made the experience less than pleasurable. Playback on the iPod is waaaaay better. The menu system was not as intuitive and the lack of a scroll-wheel made it that much less enjoyable. The only advantage I saw was the information preview of each selection (time, artist, description). But for a 30GB media player, would one's library really be so large as to not know what one owns? And talk about a BRICK.

BTW, stuartea hit it on the head. Goliath is laying on the ground expecting David to concede simply due to the size of his ego (or money bag). And we all know what ended up happening to Goliath.

MHO, the wedge

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A guest said: (hide)

Wed Nov 15, 2006 1:24 pm

Balmer seems to be in dreamland if he thinks the Turd, I mean Zune has any chance of taking on the iPod. Especially in its current iteration. The Turd is a piece of crap and there store is even worse. The wireless is a useless locked up feature with no advantages at all. FM radio is and has been the dumbest add-on that know one ever buys an MP3 player for. The whole idea is to play your own music, not listen to the radio and commercials.

Yea Balmer keep dreaming. Oh and the new iPod video is going to make your Turd really look like something that belongs in the toilet.

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A guest said: (hide)

Wed Nov 15, 2006 2:25 pm

Hmm... to put up a headline of my own:

Guest: Ballmer Can Take His Meds.

Seriously Stevie B, if you think you can do bupkiss to the iPod with your silly brown 'me too' product, you are smoking something that you should share with the class.

Go throw another chair and shut up.

...

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burreyeann said:

member since 25 Feb 2005 with 1144 posts, unranked, send him a message or view his profile

Wed Nov 15, 2006 2:28 pm

Guest wrote:

Quote:
FM radio is and has been the dumbest add-on that know one ever buys an MP3 player for.The whole idea is to play your own music, not listen to the radio and commercials.
I don't think it's THE dumbest feature I could think of. I listen to 93X to and from work everyday. That station plays a lot of the music I like. If I hear something I like, I go to iTunes and find out more about the artist and song. I also buy what I like. Having that feature, IMO, might even be a good thing. You are right though, I wouldn't buy an mp3 player just because it has FM radio.

Side note: I can't seem to be able to navigate anywhere at M$.com. I wanted to see if the Zune was Mac compatible. Gizmodo says this: http://www.gizmodo.com/gadgets/portable-media/zune-wont-be-maccompatible-at-launch-201763.php. I know the iPod wasn't Windows compatible at first, but just like M$ to forget about us Mac users! I'm glad I just bought my Nano!

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jfbiii said:

member since 06 May 2004 with 109 posts, unranked, send him a message or view his profile

Wed Nov 15, 2006 2:29 pm

Ain't that some zune.

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mike3k said:

member since 31 Dec 2001 with 61 posts, unranked, send him a message or view his profile

Wed Nov 15, 2006 3:14 pm

He threw a chair across the room as he said that.

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Bosco said:

member since 03 Jun 2002 with 1002 posts, unranked, send him a message or view his profile

Wed Nov 15, 2006 3:22 pm

You can't spell "Ballmer" without one "ball".

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A guest said: (hide)

Wed Nov 15, 2006 4:15 pm

Another headline:

Guest: Ballmer, Take This Zune and Shove It.

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A guest said: (hide)

Wed Nov 15, 2006 4:43 pm

Ballmer: "Zune can take iPod."

G.W. Bush: "Republicans will retain majority in Congress after November 7th."

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pairof9s said:

member since 28 Jun 2006 with 3 posts, unranked, send him a message or view his profile

Wed Nov 15, 2006 5:06 pm

Realistically, the article is somewhat right. It is inevitable that iPod's marketshare will decline due to overall "been there, done that" attitudes, cheap imitations, and market saturation. Granted, a great deal of the market does not own a MP3 player of any kind, but I think that speaks more on the matter of people's value of a player than in a particular player; do they actually see value in buying a digital player at all?

Look, Zune or no Zune, iPod is just a great device that has little to no threats from anyone to date. But as sure as Apple releases each quarterly statement about millions made, there will be another seeking to enter the market as the next "iPod killer". They're like restaurants; regardless of what the statistics say, companies will keep attempting to succeed.

The only fun in this one, is seeing Microsoft screw it up as they always do. Honestly, the media has completely forgotten the trail of failures Redmond has had to its one recent quasi-success, XBox. Remember...WebTV, SmartWatch, BOB, Tablet PC, PassPort, .NET (I know, but really, who's on this boat?), PlaysForSure, WinCE, MSN, Talking PCs, "The Road Ahead" (Gates so blew the Internet that he had to reissue the original publication with retractions on the issue). Even the name Zune stinks!

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saengseon said:

member since 22 Mar 2006 with 5 posts, unranked, send him a message or view his profile

Wed Nov 15, 2006 5:18 pm

Anyone who discounts MS is fooling themselves. And the competition is good. Okay, their first player is a dud, but give them time.

BTW, I've been using Apple for 20 years and I do have an iPod and love it.

I do want an FM radio, even AM, built into my iPod. Now I have to carry two devices.

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A guest said: (hide)

Wed Nov 15, 2006 5:49 pm

Lets not forget that you can guy the FM remote from Apple, yeah, adds $49 to the cost, but it's there.

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A guest said: (hide)

Wed Nov 15, 2006 6:18 pm

The reviews also say that the zune radio reception is terrible, and the sound correspondingly bad.

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A guest said: (hide)

Wed Nov 15, 2006 6:24 pm

and its responsible for the extra size and weight?

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A guest said: (hide)

Wed Nov 15, 2006 7:00 pm

saengseon wrote:
Anyone who discounts MS is fooling themselves.

Not really. The landscape of the mp3 player market simply isn't very favorable for 'me too' products, which is exactly what the Zune is, wireless or no.

For MS to truly break into this market in a major way its going to have to 'out iPod the iPod' with some kind of breakthrough, and this is not a breakthrough product, by any stretch.

Even a 'Zune 3.0' will still be niche product unless that changes, unfortunately for MS.

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JulesLt said:

member since 06 Jul 2005 with 136 posts, unranked, send him a message or view his profile

Wed Nov 15, 2006 8:31 pm

Built-in FM radio means the Zune will attract more import duty in the UK and some European states (MP3 players are zero-rated, but for historical reasons, radio receivers are). That puts them at a straight cost disadvantage, especially as the import duty is a percentage. On a cheap device - something like a shuffle, 3% or 6% is nothing, but it adds up when you're in the $300 area. I think this is one reason why Apple may offer radio as an add-on (the duty is only on the add-on, not the player).

The funny thing about MS is that - as with XBox vs Playstation - they always act as if their natural position should be dominating the market and that any other result is an aberration that must be corrected.

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A guest said: (hide)

Wed Nov 15, 2006 9:19 pm

On my most recent visit to Best Buy, I saw an IT techie up one deep at the counter, ready to purchase the Zune so he can force the corporate secretary to use it to record the meeting's minutes. This bodes well for MS because, by this method, the Zune is likely to gain a foothold in corporate IT.

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A guest said: (hide)

Wed Nov 15, 2006 9:23 pm

JulesLT: That's not going to matter because Zune is not going to be available anywhere other then the USA for a long time (and depending on its success, it may fail and NEVER be available anywhere else). I'm not sure how you take worldwide market share of a competitor without competing in all of their markets, but there you go.

AAPL sold about 39 million iPods from Sept 05 - Sept 06. That is about 106,000 units a day. The first few days of a new product launch are suposed to be huge, but I kinda doubt MS have come anywhere close to those numbers.

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A guest said: (hide)

Wed Nov 15, 2006 10:51 pm

Quick!! Get Ballmer's houka before someone notices!

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macbones said:

member since 15 Jun 2004 with 23 posts, unranked, send him a message or view his profile

Thu Nov 16, 2006 12:14 am

Well, Apple is STILL the David here. The iPod is the arrow going for M$ achilles heel. The reason M$ is getting in the iPod game is they have to. To not stop Apple here will be to loose the home computer market, the home entertainment sytem to Apple. Then it is a matter of time before that significantly splashes into the corporate market. I think M$ is seeing impending doom on their horizon. They are bound to legacy systems by business, and Apple is spreading like the common cold. An M$ is sitting there something like Jaba the Hut waiting to get slowly strangled, to fat to get out of the way of fate.

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dhp said:

member since 22 May 2003 with 182 posts, unranked, send him a message or view his profile

Thu Nov 16, 2006 12:35 am

Guest wrote:
FM radio is and has been the dumbest add-on that know one ever buys an MP3 player for. The whole idea is to play your own music, not listen to the radio and commercials.

The world is big place. I regularly listen to two FM stations, one of which is a rock/alternative station, and neither has commercials.

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A guest said: (hide)

Thu Nov 16, 2006 5:32 am

dhp wrote:
Guest wrote:
FM radio is and has been the dumbest add-on that know one ever buys an MP3 player for. The whole idea is to play your own music, not listen to the radio and commercials.

The world is big place. I regularly listen to two FM stations, one of which is a rock/alternative station, and neither has commercials.

The world is (a) big place, but the fraction of the world where you can get rock -- even alternative rock -- commericial free on the radio is pretty small. I don't think that Zune is going to rack up many sales on that basis.

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Rainy Day said:

member since 07 Jun 2005 with 607 posts, unranked, send him a message or view his profile

Thu Nov 16, 2006 6:33 am

Uncle Fester is delusional if he thinks the iTurd is gonna be anything but a gnat hitting the iPod’s windshield.

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A guest said: (hide)

Thu Nov 16, 2006 8:03 am

Remember Bush's comments on Donald Rumsfeld and Michael Brown... "They're doing great, and have my full support!"

What happened to those two? Is the Zune going to be Steve Ballmer's Rumsfeld and Brown?

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A guest said: (hide)

Thu Nov 16, 2006 10:43 am

Ballmer has always been the public "Village Idiot" face of Microsoft.

He makes the brash statements that Microsoft wishes were true and gets them the publicity they so desprately crave for their "cutting edge" product offerings that are usually bland uninspired clones of whatever Apple or anyone else is doing.

By the way, what happened to their first online music store that he predicted will be as big as the Apple iTunes store?

Anyone?

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burreyeann said:

member since 25 Feb 2005 with 1144 posts, unranked, send him a message or view his profile

Thu Nov 16, 2006 1:30 pm

Why there's an entire Wikipedia page devoted to the Zune: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zune

One of the preloaded music videos is: Kraak & Smaak featuring Dez., “Keep Me Home” (Quango Music Group).

I see a lot of references to the iPod in this article?!?!

Question: The Zune will be able to "Podcast", but, will the iPod be able to "Zunecast"? And if it could, why would it want to?

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A guest said: (hide)

Fri Nov 17, 2006 2:10 pm

Wow, the Zune's launch sure was anti-climatic. Guess the only questions left are

a) Will the iPod destroy the Zune over the holidays, or merely humiliate it?

b) Will it weeks or months before 'sales-failure' brown gets replaced by a less nauseating color?

Inquiring minds... could not care less, frankly. Its only the Zune, after all.

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A guest said: (hide)

Mon Nov 20, 2006 3:15 pm

Well, Apple is STILL the David here. The iPod is the arrow going for M$ achilles heel. The reason M$ is getting in the iPod game is they have to. To not stop Apple here will be to loose the home computer market, the home entertainment sytem to Apple. Then it is a matter of time before that significantly splashes into the corporate market. I think M$ is seeing impending doom on their horizon. They are bound to legacy systems by business, and Apple is spreading like the common cold. An M$ is sitting there something like Jaba the Hut waiting to get slowly strangled, to fat to get out of the way of fate.

who said that is an idiot. seriously...if anything apple is scrambling to gain a foothold in the market...the only thing going for them is the ipod, because macs, will never EVER outgain MS...the hold they have is too huge and frankly, apple screws up in the end always becuase they have a terrible buisness model when it comes to macs...they are good at one thing, and one thing only...macs have no possibilites, not like windows, becuase evrything is built for windows...so STFU and go listen to your fake emo on your ipod...

and btw, i work at electronics at target, and the zune is soo much easier to use than the ipod...the menus are way more intuitive, and as for the sound goes, there is no difference between it and an ipod

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A guest said: (hide)

Fri Nov 24, 2006 2:43 am

Guest wrote:

Quote:
and btw, i work at electronics at target, and the zune is soo much easier to use than the ipod...the menus are way more intuitive, and as for the sound goes, there is no difference between it and an ipod

I'll be sure to never shop at Target again. The last thing I need is some idiot like you telling me how freakin' awesome the Zune is. So take some of your own advice and, as you so eloquently stated, "STFU and go listen to your fake emo on your POS Zune".

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