Why the Microsoft Zune is Set up to Fail

I see what they should communicate:
“Welcome to the social: share easily copies of music without buying it. Make your friend buy the same product.”
Personal value: I can have free music.
Social value: My friend and I save money if we have the same product.

Can they communicate that?

Will ipod introduce social features?

This could be translated to “get the core of your product right before trying to do the extras”, or in this case, “identify what the core is correctly in the first place”. Zune, like Playstation Portable, thought that right off the bat, having a million features completely unrelated to the core product was more important than the core offering, which is why they failed and iPod and Nintendo DS continue to lead their respective markets.

Nintendo DS has a similar “social game sharing” feature where you can be “on the bus” and “discover all the people around you”. But in practice, there isn’t anyone around you with a Nintendo DS, let alone with the same game loaded on it and with it set to the mode that allows it to broadcast its presence. So that feature is a no-go. (The only way the entire concept could conceivably work is with cellphones, but since the cellphone model is so contorted (eg. no two people are using the same hardware), there are different challenges to overcome there.)

Thankfully, the DS made up for it by getting the core offering right: kickass games, a user-centered experience, and the perfect interface.

I agree that personal comes before social and I agree that the Zune is failing. I’m not sure the two are connected though.

Picture this: the Zune strategy is to try to prove that it is a better personal music player than the iPod… and the iPod is kicking its butt. A reasonable person might criticize MS for their strategy and suggest that they ought to be focusing on how the Zune is different than the iPod (i.e. the social aspect) because going head-to-head against the iPod solely as a personal music player is a fool’s errand.

Frankly, the Zune would lose either way. The only way someone is going to compete successfully against the iPod is by attacking the closed iPod-iTunes marketplace… and Microsoft is clearly not a company that’s going to compete on openness.

I agree that personal should come before social but I don’t think that it applies in this case.

The reason why the iPod is killing the Zune is because the iPod brand is an icon and the Zune is 3-4 years late to the market.

The Zune’s social strategy is a good one. I think most people buy iPods because they’re “cool” and all their friends have one (that icon thing). Well if some of your friends have a Zune, the social feature adds enough buyer incentive to be competitive with the iPod. Then comes the network effect.

Without emphasizing the social aspect of the Zune there is very little incentive for buyers to purchase it because they are very similar but Apple has the better brand.

Just because the first Zune, which went from idea to market in just a few months, isn’t kicking Apple’s ass doesn’t mean it’s doomed to fail. You’re assuming that the Zune in the store now is the only Zune there will ever be, that the v1 product needs to beat Apple’s latest generation product out the door to have any chance in the future. We all know there will be new Zunes for the holidays (see Engadget, Gizmodo, et al); who’s to say they won’t have done it right this time around, that given a year they haven’t gotten the core product right, and that they may have a better strategy this time around too?

Terry and Jared…even if the iPod didn’t exist the Zune would have the problem that it has…the message they’re communicating is that the primary value is social…and there just aren’t that many examples of that working.

Jeremy wrote:

The Zune’s social strategy is a good one. I think most people buy iPods because they’re “cool” and all their friends have one (that icon thing). Well if some of your friends have a Zune, the social feature adds enough buyer incentive to be competitive with the iPod. Then comes the network effect.

The problem, and what Joshua distils into the del.icio.us lesson, is that your friend doesn’t have one. No one’s friend does (I exaggerate of course). The net effect is that people don’t get one. The social features of the Zune do sound interesting but they presuppose a world in which lots of people have Zunes. In short, a great product strategy if you’re already the dominant player (ie. the iPod) which the Zune isn’t.

Oh, and the iPod isn’t successful because it’s cool. It’s cool because it’s successful. And it’s successful because the software and hardware work together in a way that most mp3 players still don’t come close to emulating.

If only the iPhone had the social aspects of Zune…. http://blogs.zdnet.com/Apple/?p=390

Daniel Szuc - I don’t think that Apple will succeed introducing social things, because of the simple fact that almost all Apple products are just, well, “I” things: I’ve this, I’ve that, I’m cool, I’m using Mac’s, I buy tunes, etc. I personally think that the image that Apple has, at least for a lot of people, is that it’s personal, that it enhances your personal life, not your social life.

Well, yes. Microsoft sold the Zune like a fax, instead of a printer. By not touting the personal value of the device, the emphasis was spent squarely on sending media to other Zune owners, which therefore made the decision to buy a Zune highly dependant on whether or not your friends were buying Zunes too — which, of course, was highly unlikely.

The problem is that the Zune is not a particularly well-designed product, and so speaking to its only true differentiatior as a device was really the best it could do. Offering up a comparison of the basic features forces MS to talk about the core experience being somehow better than the iPod, except for the small problem of the core experience being designed to mimic the iPod’s so they would have an even platform to tout this media sharing feature on top of; “It’s just like the iPod, but….”

As you said, the strategy was wrong.

For me, the idea of being social isn`t wrong. The problem is that they are not focusing in the product, and I haven`t found any situation (in photos or videos) where two people were connected
using the zune (combining product and social uses). That would be a strong image to share.

Interesting post, Josh — I totally agree. Back around the time of the Zune launch I went in a similar direction with the Zunebox proposal, suggesting that it’s not just the site message that’s off, but rather the product message as a whole.

Putting aside the specifics of the Zune’s sharing capabilities, offering opportunistic Zune-to-Zune wireless sharing is an excellent feature, and focusing on that capability for the launch campaign made absolute sense; unfortunately the good news ends there.

The problem was that “the social” was nothing more than a marketing campaign…the failure was in not going into the Zune’s launch with a single question at the forefront: “can we ensure that ‘the social’ isn’t just a slogan, but something that everyone who buys a Zune actually experiences within a day of opening that box?”

Because Microsoft didn’t think about the “selfish” end of things going into the launch (how soon will a Zune owner be able to actually take advantage of the social?), there was a painful disconnect between the actual experience of the device and the associated content and marketing.

To be contagious and successful, socialness requires open-ness, and part of the fundamental problem is that Microsoft has chosen a closed system (like Apple). But as Clayton Christensen might say, they are skating to where the puck is rather than where it is going, which is toward an open system of digital music delivery based on standards. Apple chose a vertically intergrated proprietary system partly because it had to in order to deliver a good enough experience, while Microsoft prematurely chose a modular system with Plays For Sure. But just as things are starting to open up and stabilize (DRM-free songs starting to become more widespread), Microsoft changes course to proprietary again.

From a social point of the view, the upshot to this is that they can only share with other Zune users, which slows adoption if adoption is slow, but also speeds it up if adoption is fast (the vicious circle is pretty clear).

If you’re interested, more thoughts on it here: http://richardsona.squarespace.com/main/2007/5/16/skating-toward-the-digital-music-puck.html

Post on http://bokardo.com/wp-social.php

Actually Apple has already a strong social aspect integrated into its system but not into iPod: Rendezvous which lets you share easily iTunes Libraries across (W)Lan infrastructure (and all other kinds of files and media).
I suppose the iPhone will enable that sharing, as well.
Just on a sidenote: Having earplugs in their ears is for me a very strong picture for someone not wanting to have social interaction…

I have a zune, it’s great for personal use. I never even have the wireless on, it just wastes more of the battery when theres not much use for since not many people use the zune. It’s works well though and I even like it a bit better than the iPod (i used to own one before I gave up on apple because my iPod broke twice and zune hasn’t broken at all).