Microsoft’s revamped Zune takes on iPod
The introduction of a smaller, sleeker version of the Zune player and the planned Zune social website reflects an attempt to build scale for a brand that so far has achieved only niche status. Microsoft has only sold about 1.2 million units of the original device in the past year.
“For something we pulled together in six months, we are very pleased with the satisfaction we got,” Microsoft’s chairman Bill Gates said earlier this week. “The satisfaction for the device was super-high. The satisfaction on the software, actually, is where we’d expect to see a huge uptick this year. It was just so-so on the software side.”
Microsoft said it had re-engineered the Zune hardware and software and the associated digital music store to make them all easier to use. Many of the changes are stylistic. It reworked the device’s navigation button and dropped one of its signature colours, brown. The Zune will be available in black, pink, green and red.
Microsoft’s efforts to enhance what had been the most talked-about feature on the original device, the ability to share music files and other media wirelessly with other Zune owners, is the most striking change. But not enough people purchased the original player for such sharing to become commonplace, and the function was crippled by usage rules negotiated with the music industry. Shared songs expired within a few days and a file acquired from one Zune user could not be shared with a third user.
Under the new rules, Microsoft said, shared songs would have no expiration date and it would be repeatedly possible to pass along songs sent from one device to another. But a shared file can be played only three times on each Zune.
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