by Playfuls Staff |
30th July 2006
After months of speculations and rumours, Microsoft eventually decided that it's time to openly admit that they're really preparing something – a competitor for iPod, more precisely, whose code name till now (and it remains to be seen whether Microsoft will change it or not) is Zune. [more]
So what is Zune and what does the company want from it? If we'd listen to what the analysts have to say, it's a competitor for iPod. If, instead, we turn to Robbie Bach – the one in charge with the project – it's some kind of Xbox for digital entertainment. Shortly put, it's a portable device which will be able to play music and videos, connect through a wireless network for Internet downloads and in which Microsoft has decided to invest hundreds of thousands of dollars.
And it's quite an ambitious project, considering that Microsoft doesn't hope to gain from it right now, but a few years later. The fact that Microsoft has been dreaming for quite a while about a player to compete the iPod is already common knowledge. What's odd is Microsoft's decision to give up the classical strategy: call a few famous hardware partners, ensure the software support and launch the product. Or at least that's how the launching recipe looked like with their last portable device, the Origami, later renamed UMPC – a project which didn't actually manage to impress as much as the involved companies wanted it to.
Probably inspired by that "adventure", Microsoft decided to take the matter in its own hands and here's how Zune – a player that will probably see the daylight in shops sometime at the end of this year – was born.
Why does Microsoft need Zune and why does the company need to step onto foreign grounds, where experienced hardware producers had to admit their incapacity of releasing a competitor for iPod on the market? Is the online music market so well developed that it generates so much money, thus pushing Microsoft to take risks worth hundreds of thousands of dollars in a moment when Windows Vista and Office 2007 are already delayed and re-delayed and when Google's ascension is making the life of Redmond-based company tougher with each passing day?
Microsoft needs Zune, and that's not to generate a few more million dollars – aspect already taken into consideration by those who handle the financing part and which won't happen so soon – but to attempt to counterattack another more important danger: to be pushed off the entertainment market. The project that Bill Gates was dreaming about not so long ago – the PC as an entertainment center – didn't prove to be such a big success and the portable devices – of which the iPod has the top position – are the new trend. What's the point of handling a cumbersome PC, when a device small enough to go into a pocket is capable to play music, movies and maybe even games?
Zune is seen by many as an iPod killer, but those won't be the grounds of the battle. For Microsoft, the stakes are much higher. Zune must be more than an iPod, it must know how to do many other things, compared to an iPod. Instead, it will be perhaps more of a competitor for PSP and other portable gaming consoles, especially since Microsoft announced that the company counts on the millions of Xbox fans to promote the initiative.
To produce a piece of equipment which won't be anything else aside from a reply to iPod would be an anachronistic reaction. Such a product would have worked in 2002 or 2004, when Apple wasn't making the laws in matters of online music.
In 2006, the public is definitely waiting for more than a competitor for iPod: something to push the limits of digital entertainment beyond the borders set by Apple.
Microsoft is perfectly conscious that, no matter how much money the company will invest in the marketing of a product which won't go above an iPod – a new name, but the same facilities – they'll only gain a temporary advantage. And this advantage will, most likely, last until Apple or some other company will come up with a new and innovative product.
So, is Zune enough to reinvent Microsoft? Will the Redmond-based company be capable – even at the cost of investing hundreds of thousands of dollars – of convincing the public that beyond its software portfolio, they are able to produce something just as competitive, but on a hardware level?
Microsoft picked a rather sensitive time for this. Everyone's still waiting for Windows Vista and Office 2007. Will Zune be enough to make consumers forget that this year is passing as well without the launch of the much awaited two software products?
And one more thing. On the 7th of August, Apple will unveil their heavy artillery at WWDC, an event where, aside from the new Mac OS X, there will also be news of the iPod and its future. All Microsoft and Zune fans can do for now is wait and hope that those news won't turn Zune into an ambitious but otherwise useless project.
