It's interesting to read the various slants taken on the news surrounding sales of Microsoft's Zune player, particularly those of the Mac-obsessed naysayers.
According to media reports scattered across the web today, Microsoft's first foray into the MP3 player market, the Zune, accounted for 9% of US MP3 player sales in its first week
this year, making it the second-best seller of hard disk drive-based media players
for 2006. (Corrections thanks to user Curtis Blow)
Meanwhile, Apple's total market share for the year has fallen to 82.7 percent, compared with 86.8 percent a year ago -- a share that also includes flash-based players, which Microsoft currently doesn't offer. (Ask Steve Jobs which figure he'd prefer, and I'll give you my life savings if he said he'd be happy with a drop in numbers).
Of course, the first thing all Worshipers at The Temple of Steve do when they see such mouth-wateringly low figures, is to bang away at their shiny white keyboards to produce some suitably dull and scathing criticism peppered with sneering remarks about the derisory brown-coloured MP3 player's pitifully low sales.
Let's get something straight here: the Zune has been officially on sale
for less than six weeks -- yet it's still on course to sell a million units in its first fiscal year.
This is at a time when the market is literally saturated with MP3 players of all shapes, sizes -- and colours -- not least of which are the six different varieties of iPod you can currently waste your money on. (And, please, let's try not to pretend they won't be superseded by so-called 'newer models' before summer 2007).
Looking at it historically, the first iPod only managed to sell 250,000 units when it was released late in 2001, only to be superseded by a new model less than a year later -- and this was at a time when there was absolutely zero competition in the marketplace other than Creative Labs. Compared to Microsoft, Apple had a dreadfully slow start, and it took them until well into Q4 of 2003 before they reached the million sales mark -- almost two years.
It's much more interesting to read Microsoft's take on the whole thing, rather than the rantings of those struck blind by the glow from their G4 case:
"Microsoft expressed little concern about the sales. Jason Reindorp, director of product marketing for Zune, said, ``We are happy with the position Zune currently holds in the market, and are on track to meet our sales projection of 1 million units by end of the fiscal year.''"I'm no Microsoft fan, and the Zune might seem a bit foolish for an MP3 player, but there's plenty of fools still prepared to buy it.
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