Today, Microsoft announced the pending arrival of the Zune “family of hardware and software products”. Zunes are portable music and video playing devices intended to compete with Apple’s iPod products and to win back some of the latter’s 75% market share of the digital entertainment business. According to Gaming Steve, the iPod-killer, er, iPod-discomfiter? will have a 30GB hdd, Wi-Fi and be able to access music and videos directly from Microsoft’s Live Anywhere platform, bypassing the need for a computer. Details will be forthcoming at the drolly-named website comingzune.
There’s an appropriate quote over at Forbes regarding competition in general, the Zune in particular and the pace of change in consumer electronics: “…the challenge for any tech company is to obsolete your products or someone else will“.
Zune Gets in the Ring – Billboard, July 29, 2006
Related posts:
{ 3 comments… read them below or add one }
- Does that mean you can only download using Microsoft’s Live Anywhere? Can you just drag and drop the files from your computer? Does it use itunes? If so, does it have to use itunes?<br />
<br />
- What’s with the feature that auto-deletes any file you get from someone else’s zune after 3 listens?<br />
<br />
- Battery life? Do we need worry about “zune’s dirty little secret” web pages popping up? Assuming the battery is rechargable, can you take the battery out and replace it? or is it inaccessable, like ipods?<br />
What was the deal with the dirty little secret web pages? I hadn’t heard about those.
I think even the term “iPod discomfiter” may have been stretching things a bit.