Zune a brown elephant?

Stan Beer
Friday, 10 November 2006 08:50

Opinion and Analysis

I must confess to having a good chuckle at a blog article criticising Microsoft's Zune strategy on the Forbes site by David M Ewalt. The article does indeed raise some important defects in Microsoft's strategy. The good news for Microsoft is that most of them can be fixed. The bad news is that one key problem cannot.

The very first issue to my mind which needs to be addressed by Microsoft is its stupid points system for buying music downloads. If someone wants to buy a 99c (US) song that they happen to like they don't want to be forced to buy US$5 worth of points giving Microsoft an interest free loan while they decide what they may want to buy. In fact, they may not want to buy anything else at all. They may just want rip everything else off their own CD collection.

If Microsoft's plan is to succeed in the music player space by copying Apple's model, which appears to be the case, then they should note the fine details of what Apple does. The success of iTunes demonstrates that people want to buy music with real cash not artificial currency invented by Microsoft. They also want the ability to pay for one song and one song only. That's the whole point.

For people who don't have a credit card or a debit card, Apple quite some time ago introduced a very good system that allows users to purchase vouchers at retail stores.

The second area where Microsoft seems to have missed a great opportunity to score a goal against Apple is its plan for wirelessly sharing songs between friends on Zune. Why on earth would Microsoft not want users, who been loaned a song for three plays or three days, to have the ability to purchase that song directly from their wirelessly connected player is a mystery to many a market watcher.

For that matter, what a great viral marketing opportunity Microsoft and the record companies are missing out on by not allowing users who have been loaned shared songs to pass them on to other friends, who in turn could buy them directly from their own players or pass them on to others.

Fortunately for Microsoft, both of the above issues can be addressed mainly through policy changes. There are no great technological hurdles that Microsoft has to overcome to meet what the market will demand.