Microsoft copied the only iPod they could

Juan-Antonio has a really good point. M$ has a history of putting out 2 or 3 flops, then getting it right and having a runaway success. The Xbox is one of the few things I've seen them have a success with the first time out, such as it was.

Hey, I do not want to be the sour grape but... MS is always late (lack of imagination, no doubt), but once it enters a market they hammer it until they become dominant. Netscape vs IE comes to mind, everybody was laughing and ridiculing how MS lost it and that was the beginning of the end of the giant. Where is Netscape now? I just hope that Apple is wiser this time around.

They did have another option -- buy a company like iRiver that alrerady makes a broad line of devices and stick to SW features for the first round of launches. This has several advantages:
- It instantly gives them a broad line of products from standalone MP3 players to media players which are quite well designed but lacking in distribution and marketing. This woudl include the flash-based segment which I also believe is where they should have started. (Samsung's new player looks cooler than a nano, but their SW likely stinks).
- It gets them out of the box of having to top Apple on the HW side (ie. "hey, it's just what iRiver had in the oven when we bought them... look for big innovations next year").

Knowing Microsoft's "not invented here" culture all too well, this would have been very hard for them to swallow. There's no reason an outsider has anything to teach them that a couple billion in investment can't solve over several year period. After all, Xbox spent $4 billion and is only beginning to break even after 5 years. That's not too bad, right?

@3- I don't think Steve Jobs exposed anything. It's not like the hardware/software integration wasn't a well-known and talked about benefit of the iPod.

But yeah, it's pretty obvious that MS decided late in the game to switch strategies and duplicate Apple. Problem is that merely matching Apple at this point is likely not enough, what with the confusion it causes with PlaysForSure, their hardware partners, and of course iPod market dominance.

They added a cool hardware feature (wifi), but then crippled the actual application of it to the point where it's of marginal value. The larger screen is nice, too bad you have to transcode everything to WMV.

The Amazon rankings are a good barometer. But also, have a look at the star ratings. Only 3 for the Zune (Black) in #6 position. What's up with that? Blind faithful buying it and not satisfied? Reviews are telling.

So everyone that ever makes a hard-drive based MP3 player is copying the iPod? Talk about hubris. I'm glad Microsoft is entering the market, as the more competition the better. The iPod is not the "OMG Perfect!!" player people make it out to be, and any and all competition is great. I love Apple computers, but cannot stand the iPod or iTunes.

Microsoft fell into Steve Jobs' trap with a combination of hubris, and greed. No matter how dominant they are in the world of tech, they can't stand a market that they don't dominate, especially with Apple showing them up.

Less than a year before the Zune project got started, Steve Jobs was interviewed by some business or news magazine, and asked how he would kill the iPod if he were one of the competitors. He basically said that the user experience of the competition sucks because it is divided up too much; the solution to killing the iPod, as Jobs said, was vertical integration: have one company control the player hardware, the software, and the content distribution. (In other words, imitate the iPod/iTunes model.) I thought to myself, "Exposing the cause-and-effect of the iPod's success has got to be either one of the stupidest things Steve Jobs has ever done, or one of the most brilliant things he has ever done."

It has turned out to be the latter. Steve Ballmer has said that the Zune effort is a marathon, not a sprint. Basically, by luring Microsoft into doing this, Steve Jobs has led MS to stab its partners in the back while investing in a long-haul project that not only will fail, but will bleed MS of billions of dollars in the process and breed much ill will against it along with erroding confidence in MS--as if Windows Vista weren't enough to do that. Brilliant!

One should note, however, that this is likely their first DAP of several. It's almost certain that they have a flash-based DAP in the works to combat the nano. It's only a matter of time before it's introduced and invariably fails. Can't wait!

"Who wants to bet how excited Steve Ballmer's kids are to 'squirt' at school?"

I think if I was Ballmer's son, I'd commit suicide.

I was in RadioShack yesterday getting a universal remote, and while I was paying, I saw the Zune in the display case at the register. Being my first "real" look at a Zune up close, from my observation it looks more like the original iPod (clunky, thick, "brick"-like). I'd have to agree that they needed to spend more time perfecting it and making it more like the Nano.

Interestingly, out of curiosity, I asked the sales guy in RadioShack how many Zunes they had sold in the three weeks (or however long it's been) since its release and the sales guy responded:

"I think...only one?"