Jobs says Zune will lose its lovers

Stan Beer
Monday, 16 October 2006 06:09

IT Industry - Strategy

On the fifth anniversary of the release of iPod, Apple's founding CEO Steve Jobs has dismissed Microsoft's upcoming competitor Zune flippantly, saying its music sharing technology is too slow. In the Newsweek interview with Steven Levy, Jobs also explained how Apple convinced music companies to open their warehouses to iTunes and not to raise prices.

According to Jobs, he is not worried by Microsoft's claim that Zune is about building communities of music listeners. Jobs says that from demonstrations he has seen, the Zune music sharing system, which allows a user to play a shared song three times, "takes forever. By the time you've gone through all that, the girl's got up and left! You're much better off to take one of your earbuds out and put it in her ear," he says.

Jobs also defended claims that some record companies think that the Apple iTunes online music store has too much power. He said that Apple resisted pressure to raise prices of music downloads because it would break a deal that Apple had with people that the company had convinced to stop music piracy.

"Our core initial strategy on the store was that if you want to stop piracy, the way to stop it is by competing with it, by offering a better product at a fair price. And it worked," Jobs told Newsweek.

Jobs went on to say that he convinced music companies not raise prices by telling them, "many [users] will say, 'I knew it all along that the music companies were going to screw me, and now they're screwing me.' And they would never buy anything from iTunes again. We would never recover their trust."

The full interview can be found here.