Wired confirms an earlier CNet report that it is very hard to find or share music with another Zune user. Population density is one issue, but I think there’s another problem – the Zune sharing scenario is based on false assumptions.
Discovering music has always been a personal issue. The reason Napster worked (and evidently other file-sharing networks do today) is because people feel empowered and proud to discover music by themselves. Of course, this is the same reason Virgin and HearMusic have listening posts for consumers to try before they buy. This treats music as a uniquely individual and personal experience. There are a critics who claim that the iPod has isolated people and made them anti-social but guess what, that’s how people like their music. Good music is intensely personal and embracing. And then there’s Right Said Fred.
The Zune model is inherently a music studio’s dream. Someone else controls the push and whether you like it or not some crap shows up on your Zune every now and then (if it works). In the perfect world that Microsoft dreamt up with Universal, paid stooges would have probably been in every corner pushing Ashlee Simpson’s latest non acid-reflux induced single.
Microsoft inherently misunderstands the need to share or maybe they understand it but are hampered by technical limitations. If it’s the latter then they should have tried another model, for example, sharing a playlist wirelessly without the silly three song three day experiment. I, on the other hand, feel that its the former: Microsoft doesn’t understand the consumer. Mike Elgin wrote a follow-up to his Zune article and suggested remedies that can help make Zune a success. It’s the usual list of recommendations: better design, usability, and compatibility (especially with Microsoft’s own other effort, Plays For Sure). Elgin’s other suggestion:
the Mac is more elegant than Windows, but most people prefer Windows. And that’s how Microsoft can kill the iPod: Make the Zune more like a Windows PC.
There’s only one fault with this logic: assuming that Microsoft can make a consumer product. Except for specialized areas (Xbox), Microsoft has historically sucked at developing products for the consumer market. They never have and never had to listen to consumers – their end-users were Dells & HPs and enterprises. That is why their products are bloated and do not make any sense for the mass consumer market. Take Office for instance, its a huge, feature-ridden, over-the-top product that does not address any specific consumer need. The features are there because every large enterprise customer wanted it in, so there was never a impetus to push-back. The result is that you have enterprises happy with a subset of the features and they don’t mind the extra bloat even if they don’t use it – and note, it’s probably not the same 20% that every different enterprise uses. Consumers were just an accidental market for Microsoft.
It looks like Zune was designed the same way. Some half-wit thought the Napster was cool, but misunderstood it to be a promotional platform than one for discovery and ended up with the Zune, a product that addresses neither sharing nor discovery.
