Microsoft banks on Zune Wi-Fi

Stan Beer
Friday, 15 September 2006 18:32

Opinion and Analysis

You walk into your local Starbucks with your friends and you order some iced mochas. After collecting your cool drinks you all sit down together and start to listen to some cool music on your Zunes - together. That's the vision of Microsoft.

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As you all have different music libraries on your 30GB hard discs, you decide to pool your resources and make a playlist. Then you can all share files wirelessly and listen to the best of the pooled music.

After you go home you can review the tracks you've listened to and choose some of them to download and buy.

Alternatively, imagine a party that goes on to the small hours of the morning where the music is loud but no neighbours complain. It's a Zune party. Everybody has their own personal music machine wirelessly synchronised to the playlist pool. If you don't have one you're not cool.

Of course this is all just wild speculative imagination at play, but the technology actually exists to make it happen. In fact it has for some time.

Quite a few years ago, I did a tour of the former Alacatraz prison in San Francisco Bay. Each visitor was given their own portable cassette player with head set so that they could go on their own private tour complete with commentary on what they were seeing. It was a fascinating experience. However, it would have had an extra dimension if a group of us could have experienced the same thing at the same time together.

That's what Microsoft is aiming to do with Zune. Microsoft wants to turn the portable music player into the portable wirelessly networked communal music player.

It's a bold vision. It means changing the way people do things. It means creating a new paradigm like Apple did with the iPod and and iTunes. The stakes are high because success could mean market dominance. Failure could mean that Microsoft would be doomed to bit player status in one of the most lucrative consumer markets.

Microsoft may well succeed in its achieving its vision but the company, unlike Apple, seems to have a perennial problem in the consumer space. Instead of trying to figure out what the consumer wants, Microsoft tries to tell them.

Maybe this time Microsoft will succeed in its quest to coax consumers to accept its new paradigm for communal music listening. However, is room full of networked music player listeners really a more elegant solution than a simple juke boxx?