Shock: Microsoft hasn’t sold one million Zunes after all!

Alex Zaharov-Reutt
Thursday, 31 May 2007 00:19

Opinion and Analysis

News reports suggesting Microsoft has sold a little over a million Zunes were inadvertently wrong, due to a transcription error which saw a critical part of a sentence change – but Microsoft will have sold 1 million units soon enough.

Business 2.0’s Philip Elmer-DeWitt has uncovered a transcription error in the San Francisco Chronicle’s interview with Microsoft’s Zune and Xbox chief Robbie Bach, which substantially alters Bach’s reported claim of having sold over a million Zunes since launch in the US a little over 6 months ago.

While the printed newspaper report quoted Bach as saying that “We're still about nine months into having Zune in the marketplace. We're very pleased with the progress. We've sold a little over a million Zunes (…)”, the Chronicle’s own freely downloadable podcast of the interview lets you hear what Bach really said.

Bach’s actual words were: “When we finish our fiscal year in June we'll have sold a little over a million Zunes, so we feel very good about that”.

Given that Microsoft’s internal target for 1 million Zune sales is actually June, and given that Bach admits Microsoft has yet to hit the million Zune mark, the claim that Microsoft beat its own Zune sales target by a month turns out to be wrong, although hitting your target in the timeframe previously advised is no bad thing – imagine if Microsoft had managed to do that with Vista!

Of course, in the same timeframe, Apple has sold millions upon millions of iPods, putting Apple at more than 99 million units ahead of the Zune since the iPod was released more than five years ago.

Microsoft have previously announced that, like the Xbox before it, the Zune is one of Microsoft’s long term investments, with Bach confirming that two new Zunes are on the way later this year, with one being a new hard disk based model, while the other is equipped with flash memory, although no specifications were given concerning capacity, the inclusion of a cell phone or anything else.

So, while Microsoft still hasn’t sold 1 million Zunes, they’re close to the mark and are expected to reach it by the end of June.

Still, if you’re really over the moon about the Zune and want one instead of an iPod, now might not be the best time to buy, as we know for sure that two new models are on the way.

That said, the new pink and watermelon colors for the current Zune have proven popular for Microsoft, in a sign that, if nothing else, people like colors.