CrunchGear

I’ve said it before and I will say it again: You cant make the ‘killer’ feature rely on other people having the device. “Welcome to the social”? Social requires people.

If Apple introduced an iPod with social-song-sharing, it would probably be well received and you’d see a jump in sales of the latest model. But, they have the bulk of the market- and mind-share.

If you want to make an iPod killer, one-up Apple on the things they do well and make it cheaper. Make it small and ’sexy’, not bulky and rubberized. Make it integrate very easily with WMP and support a ton of formats especially the formats your company has marketed (no Plays-For-Sure?! geeze). You’ve already proven this can work with the gaming market, so take a loss in order to substantially undercut Apple on price in order to break their stranglehold on the market, then work on a profitable version for your second gen.

Maybe I should work for Microsoft… hah!

The thing that immediately turned me off to the Zune is that the Zune Marketplace does not support podcast subscriptions. I mean, how are you going to make an “iPod Killer” and not even support Podcasts???

I would say that at least 50% of the time I spend listening to my iPod I am listening to Podcasts. Look, I know people like me and other Crunchgear readers are not the regular consumer, but if Podcasts are not yet mainstream, then they are certainly on the very edge of it.

But look, let’s give MS a break too, this is their first gen Zune, and it will get better.

It has to get better. In order to get any roi it just has to and it probably will. M$ has surpised us in the past - anyone here have an xbox? Integration with wmp is key imo to make it work out of the box without, for argument’s sake, learning something new. Opening the formats would be great but M$ has to make sure that all the back scratching doesn’t turn into back stabbing (uma, riaa, mpaa, etc). Not to mention it will be hacked anyway…

My contention has always been that there are two ways to make a “killer” device (on a side note I don’t think anyone should make a “killer” device because the true “killers” do it by accident). The first approach is what I would call over-kill. This is the PS3 approach but on an even bigger scale. The idea is to put so many more features into a device that it makes the competition look old and busted in comparison. The problem with this is that your price will obviously be easy to undercut and you will have to be able to justify a higher cost and be sure that the market can handle it. The other option is to simplify. Do a few things and do them VERY well. This was basically what the original iPod did. iPods have never had as many features as the competition but they have been successful do to marketing and a perception of improved user experience. If you only do a few things but do them hands down better then everyone else then consumer’s will support you.

I smell a price drop.

Game is not over yet.. we’re still expecting to sell 1 million of these devices by end of our fiscal year (june) for 10% of the market, which is not bad at all. Given Apple has had a fantastic product in this space and has been single-handedly growing the market on their own, it’s great to capture 10%.

I think Bill Gates has the best quote yet -

“we’re not just going to do media; we’ll do more”