The Hype Machine
This isn’t so much about Microsoft and Zune, as about the news media. But…look at this. In the morning I sit down at my computer and call up google news. It’s a really nice headline service. And what do I see? A bunch of headlines screaming at me that Microsoft’s Zune player has already taken second place in the compact digital music player race. Gosh.
Zune Grabs the Second Place in The MP3 Player Market
Zune opens at No. 2 in portable media players
Microsoft Takes Early MP3 Silver
And it’s only been out for a few days. So maybe Microsoft’s legendary (and occasionally illegal) marketing power, would succeed once more over it’s legendary technological incoherence.
Well…no, actually…
During the time period in question…the iPod had about 68 percent of the market share, and Zune, at second place, had 9. In other words, Zune is the top dog in the category of "other". Which isn’t hard to fathom, given all the hype that preceded it.
Meanwhile…the other story about Zune that we’re not hearing more about…
Universal Music looking to extract royalties on every iPod sold?
Remember that deal Bill made with Universal Music? Yeah. Part of the game for Bill may simply have been to use the RIAA as a tool to cut into Steve’s iPod profits. But that isn’t likely the entire game. Zune doesn’t have to be a money maker for Microsoft in order to succeed. It doesn’t even have to have market share. All it has to do, is kill the ability of Microsoft’s competitors to set the course of this technology as it develops. Zune doesn’t have to be king of the player market, as long as every player in that market, eventually comes to depend on Microsoft technology in order to work…
Microsoft’s handling of the whole "Plays for Sure" initiative can only be described as a fiasco in the wake of the Zune music player launch. The Zune uses its own software to manage songs and has no integration with the "Plays for Sure" ecosystem of DRMed music, so customers who purchased songs from PfS online music stores (including the URGE online store integrated into Windows Media Player 11) are unable to use them with the new Zune.
However, according to Michael Gartenberg at JupiterResearch, songs purchased from the Zune online store will actually play on many Plays for Sure devices. It seems as if the Zune player will only play WMA-DRM songs specifically tagged by the Zune online store, but other PfS players only look to see if the song is in the WMA-DRM format and don’t bother checking to see if it is a "Zune" song or not.
You shake hands with Microsoft and you need to count your fingers afterwords. But look at this. Now Bill has a nascent eco-system of playback devices out there, and a few online music stores, that all depend on his technology. And he’s the only one so far offering the kind of deal the big music companies want. The more of that Bill gets out there, the harder it is for Apple, or anyone else, to stand on their own. Remember two things about Microsoft: They’re not a hardware company, and Bill’s primary skill set isn’t his grasp of technology. It’s that he’s a thousand percent more devious and cutthroat then anyone else in America since Rockefeller made his oil empire.
If they get away with it, then in the future there will be both an RIAA tax and a Microsoft tax on every music player sold in America. Including the iPod if the big music companies decide that Plays For Sure, or some Microsoft technology, is the only way they’ll allow their music to be sold. Even the iPod may someday have a little bit of Zune inside of it. And Zune itself could be long gone. People will laugh at how foolish Microsoft was, to produce that piece of junk.
