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When the Zune marketing team was formed at Microsoft they probably had a bunch of meetings with the Xbox guys and, well, every other product marketing team in Redmond. There is precedence for Microsoft delivering a product into a crowded marketplace with a clear stand-out, and Xbox/Playstation isn't the only instance of the company having success there. But with the iPod it's a hell of a problem, iPod being the defacto term for portable music player and all. The Kleenex, Band Aid and Q-tip of portable electronics (or the walkman of our age) is the iPod. It's a long uphill road from there.
At a few points along that road you expect members of the Zune team to just give up the ghost. Say, screw it, and move their family back to Virginia or wherever where they were happy and had jobs that they could be good at. One of those points was probably when the first saw the Zune. That must have inspired a lot of "what does it all mean" internal struggles. Another probably occurred this weekend when they opened up their Seattle Times --the Zune's home paper, if one had to be designated-- and saw an AP reprint headlined: "Lost man's iPod doubles as rescue beacon."
How do you compete with that? How do you compete with a lost mushroom picker shining a big, glowing Apple into the sky like he's expecting either Batman, Bono or Steve Jobs himself to swoop down from the skies and point him to the access road, a patch of mushrooms and a bunch of free iTunes downloads?
They finally located the Vancouver, Wash., man after 1 a.m. Friday when a member of a search-and-rescue team saw the light from the iPod, she said.Nou, lacking a flashlight, had been using the music device for light, Peirson said.
She said the underbrush was so thick it took rescuers more than 20 minutes to reach Nou once they saw the glow.
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Actually here in Kitsap County we are prone to power outages due to windstorms and gremlins. I used my iPod and DS Lite to get around our house until we could get a fire and candles going. Also have went down underneath the house and flipped circut breakers by using my DS Lite as a light source.
These days most eletronics has fancy bright lights. I've used the blue glow of my cell phone to flag down my wife while in a crowd in the dark. I'm sure Zune is backlit as well.
Yeah, that's cool and I do that too. I navigate my way to bed with a cell phone backlight. My point is he didn't have DS or a zune or a psp or whatever with him while he was lost in the woods, or, at least, that's not what the article says. He had an ipod. Kind of a weird item to have while mushroom picking, and I can't even imagine listening to headphones while I was hiking, but whatever. It's that essential. You even take it mushroom picking.
My question is what kind of person goes off mushroom picking alone in the woods and what do they listen to on their iPod? I mean what is propper mushroom hunting music? Hootie, Phish, The Dead?
Oh yeah and Zune still hates Mac OSX.
If only he had the Zune's big, bright, 3" screen, he might have been rescued sooner. :)
Harvey
Editor, Zunerama
So why can Apple make a cross platform music player but Microsoft can't? That is my question. I love digital music and I should be Microsoft's target audiance but I am down with OSX and can't use a Zune because of it.
Feh, none of these new-fangled gizmos can lay a hand on my Zire 71: not only can I listen to cross-platform music, AND attract low-flying aircraft with the brightly backlit screen, but I can balance my checkbook, read a novel, and check my email, among other things - can an Ipod or Zune do all that?
So why can Apple make a cross platform music player but Microsoft can't?
They can, but they don't want to.
Next question?
So I guess they really are not trying as hard as they could to sell the Zune. If Microsoft was really trying to sell a sexy digital consumer product like the iPod they might want to stop thinking like well Microsoft. My Xbox 360 is much more Mac freindly than a Zune would be.
How do you compete with that? How do you compete with a lost mushroom picker shining a big, glowing Apple into the sky like he's expecting either Batman, Bono or Steve Jobs himself to swoop down from the skies and point him to the access road, a patch of mushrooms and a bunch of free iTunes downloads?
That right there is some funny writing.