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Our Blogs The BeerFiles Zune is no PC
Our Blogs The BeerFiles Zune is no PC | Zune is no PC |
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| by Stan Beer | |
| Wednesday, 29 November 2006 | |
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For home users, the unsightly and user-unfriendly PC started out as a flop compared to the elegant and user-friendly Mac but triumphed in the end because of its success in business. The Zune has also started out as a flop and it is going to end up a flop. There is no Wintel alliance and business user scenario to save the Zune. Microsoft is trying to enlist the support of the recording industry and get record companies onside by giving them a cut of Zune player sales. This will fail. iTunes is turning over hundreds of millions of sales each year and growing, iPods dominate the top 10 positions on the Amazon best seller electronics consumer devices list while Zune players can't even get into the top 100. Despite their posturing, record companies know on which side their bread is buttered and they may not like it, but they know that Apple and Jobs call the shots in the online music business. Then there are the suggestions that while Zune may not take market share from iPod, it will crush the rest of the competition. Even this assumption is highly questionable. Both the Sandisk Sansa and Creative Zen are easily outselling Zune and both have access to bigger ranges of music from online stores which are compatible with Microsoft's own PlaysForSure DRM standard. Microsoft's Zune team has reportedly denigrated PlaysForSure, saying it was broken. Well perhaps Microsoft should have concentrated on fixing it because a Zune running Windows Media Player with PlaysForSure, with an option to buy music and videos from a wide range of stores would seem to make a lot more sense than what the company has in place now. |
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