Five years later, Zune's troubled journey comes to an end

Microsoft has finally called the time of the death on its Zune hardware, though the Zune brand will live on in Windows Phones.

<a href='http://meincmagazine.com/gadgets/news/2011/10/five-years-later-zunes-troubled-journey-comes-to-an-end.ars'>Read the whole story</a>

 

[Sonan]

This is sad. I really liked the few Zunes I got to interact with. The iPod juggernaut strikes again.

 

[neodorian]

Bummer. I had a first gen and a zuneHD. Both were excellent players but nowadays I just use my smartphone. Once mp3 players moved to flash memory I lost the advantage of being able to carry my whole collection with me so it's easier to just load up the microsd on my Evo and not carry two devices. Still, Zune pass was pretty awesome. Just like Spotify but with 10 "for keeps" tracks every month.

 

[TheGreatGooglyMoogly]

Blatent "whats a Zune?!" troll aside, I haven't seen a Zune for sale since around 2007 (BestBuy, etc). I wasn't aware they were still selling...

 

[AdamJS]

Well, that means hope for another massive liquidation like what happened with their brown HDD Zunes.

$20 high capacity mp3 players agogo.

 

[Entegy]

Shame. Windows Phone 7 needs something to run on that's not a phone, like iOS with iPod touch.

 

[jsl4980]

Well I'm surprised, I thought the Zune hardware died 4 years ago. Did they finally run out of stock or have they actually been making new ones up until now? Where have they been putting them all?

 

[PrimalGecko]

I still love my Zune 30GB. It stays in my car pumping out tunes through the stereo and I bring it in every now and then to have some new music added to it. I never used Zune Pass, but I loved the hardware. Such a shame.

 

[putty]

From zune.net:

"We recently announced that, going forward, Windows Phone will be the focus of our mobile music and video strategy, and that we will no longer be producing Zune players."

So is it going to take another five years of Microsoft throwing money at Windows Phone to figure out that they missed the boat on the smartphone market too? They should just change their tagline to read "Microsoft: too little too late".

 

[halirin]

Yeah, this is kind of bittersweet. I've been quite pleased with my 2nd generation Zune over the years (even though I can't really imagine having bought another, even when the touch one came out).

It seems the end of the dedicated music player is approaching, but it really has been nice to have my entire music collection in my car. I'm not sure what I'll do when my Zune dies; hopefully the price of flash memory comes down enough that a 64gb+ ipod touch isn't prohibitively expensive by then.

 

[Jordan Orlando]

They put a great deal of thought and care into these products (especially the design). It's too bad they haven't had to fight that sort of uphill-battle for consumers more often. They might get very good at it.

 

[flash__]

I quite enjoyed my Zune to be honest. I thought the UI was far superior to the iPod UI at the time, which is a bit ironic considering the image of the companies that made each device.
It would have been nice if people had given the Zune a chance, but MS really showed up late to the party I suppose. The MP3 player market has been saturated with iPods for a very, very long time.

 

[El Chupageek]

The recent zune's were the best marriage of UI and hardware design I've seen in the dedicated media player market. It's a shame they couldn't ever make a dent in the mindshare apple has since it was a pretty deserving product. Hell, it deserved some love just for not making you use iTunes

 

[Mortus]

I quite enjoyed my Zune to be honest. I thought the UI was far superior to the iPod UI at the time, which is a bit ironic considering the image of the companies that made each device.

I will second this opinion. My original Zune was great.

 

[Mister E. Meat]

As a 1st gen Zune owner, I can't say I'm surprised at all but I think this decision has more to do with smartphones than the iPod.

Other than the iPod touch, I don't think media players are selling anymore at all. It's debatable whether the iPod touch is even a media player per se; I'm sure it sells as much if not more for the apps than it does as a dedicated player. Further, I myself have considered ditching my Zune several times and just using my phone, but since the battery on my phone is flaky as it, adding two hours of music playing during my commute won't help matters.

As Entegy mentioned, I am a little surprised that they didn't come out with a "Zune Touch" or whatever they would have called it to be a Win7 phone without the phone. I'm sure it's possible that if their marketplace takes off, they may consider reviving the brand.

 

[Trodamus]

I'm happy to see Zune survive as a software platform that will likely be the new Media Center for any and all windows and/or microsoft products. Now, if it just had a cloud service so I could just put my collection on the ephemeral zune and play it on all my devices...

 

[azimutha]

Pity Windows Mobile is already associated with the old, Win98 Microsoft. It would be a good moniker for current devices (with or without cellular/3G/4G connectivity). But then I'm not sure what market there is even for the Touch. I hardly ever use mine any more and one of the reasons is the lack of connectivity outside of home or coffee shops. Another issue is form factor. If you can only use a device in relatively sedentary conditions, wouldn't you rather have the larger screen of, say, a 7" tablet?

 

[shadyrudy]

Yeah, this is kind of bittersweet. I've been quite pleased with my 2nd generation Zune over the years (even though I can't really imagine having bought another, even when the touch one came out).

It seems the end of the dedicated music player is approaching, but it really has been nice to have my entire music collection in my car. I'm not sure what I'll do when my Zune dies; hopefully the price of flash memory comes down enough that a 64gb+ ipod touch isn't prohibitively expensive by then.

I still use the Zune HD at the gym. Built in HD radio is great, too. Is HD radio even making a dent?

 

[TheDissolver]

Does this mean the Zune tattoo will become hip and trendy (in an ironic/nostalgic sort of way)?

 

[Chmilz]

I love my Zune 80. MS really missed the boat, they had the only real competitor to the iPod, but failed to advertise it worth squat.

MS had every opportunity to be a 50/50 player against iPod in the dedicated music market and completely let it slip. Not sure if they were waiting for the device to go viral or something, but I don't understand why I didn't see endcaps at every retailer and heavy adveritising promoting it.

MS just really sucks at marketing. Couldn't sell life support to a dying man.

 

[Evil_Merlin]

I still have my Zunes, my HD is plugged into my Sync in the Focus, and my 120 is on my desk at the office.

Still no MP3 player out there can meet my needs or give the features the Zune does.

 

[sevensor]

I've got to express my appreciation for the understated irony in the photo caption. Search for "zune accessory" on Amazon: 112 hits. Search for "ipod accessory" on Amazon: 90,246 hits. So much for the "whole ecosystem" of zune products!

 

[CeridianMN]

Blatent "whats a Zune?!" troll aside, I haven't seen a Zune for sale since around 2007 (BestBuy, etc). I wasn't aware they were still selling...

Well I'm surprised, I thought the Zune hardware died 4 years ago. Did they finally run out of stock or have they actually been making new ones up until now? Where have they been putting them all?

I bought my ZuneHD from Best Buy in the Minneapolis suburbs shortly after Christmas 2009.

 

[dlux]

Microsoft could still extend its mobile platform to non-phones, though the Windows Phone branding will make that a bit difficult.

Why should the term 'Phone' hinder other mobile initiatives? It's not as if the 'Windows' label has any meaning in that area.

 

[cayce]

RIP Zune players...

Had an original brown Zune to spite my Apple obsessed (now ex) girlfriend. Was quite pleasantly surprised with it! Would still be using it to this day if it hadn't succumbed to a terminal fall by my clumsy hands...

I personally blame Ballmer for his "squirt" comments!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MLpLpO2WeO0

 

[Commenter_X]

The Zune was D.O.A. and kept alive on Microsoft's deep pockets alone. Windows Phone 7 is the same story and 5 years from now we will be reading this same article with WP7 instead of Zune.

 

[dlux]

Does this mean the Zune tattoo will become hip and trendy?

Highly unlikely.

 

[pw38]

From zune.net:

"We recently announced that, going forward, Windows Phone will be the focus of our mobile music and video strategy, and that we will no longer be producing Zune players."

So is it going to take another five years of Microsoft throwing money at Windows Phone to figure out that they missed the boat on the smartphone market too? They should just change their tagline to read "Microsoft: too little too late".

It's not just MS, every other player in the market is playing second fiddle to the iPod. MS just figured it was time to cut and run since this wasn't a large part of their business to begin with. Creative and others are apparently content with sloppy seconds.

I like the Zune brand though and Zune Pass is awesome. I hope they keep the branding around.

 

[Jackattak]

My wife and I have always loved our Zunes, from the gen1 to the HD. I don't think of this as the Zune dying...it will live on in the Windows Phone (natural progression).

 

[lyme]

The Zune was D.O.A. and kept alive on Microsoft's deep pockets alone. Windows Phone 7 is the same story and 5 years from now we will be reading this same article with WP7 instead of Zune.

So true, it is virtually impossible to get through the Apple distotion field. However now with SJ pretty much out of the picture, I fully expect Apple products to slowly lose that special mass market lustre.

 

[JadedBarbie]

I still use my Creative MP3 player ... and have been using Creative MP3 players for years... but I'll keep an eye out for a sale. I have nothing against Zune, just I could get a cheap MP3 player at for a few dollars that I don't have to have iTunes to use.

 

[dlux]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MLpLpO2WeO0

I always liked that ad. It's too bad that the band didn't expand that into a full song.

 

[traceyshusband]

can't help feeling that the name was at least half the problem.

Zune, Bing, Kin are terrible names and unlikely to ever gain traction regardless how good the product itself is.

 

[AlfieJr]

sure, marketing was poor. the name was a poor choice, and those colors ... yuck.

but the basic problem is totally obvious: the Zune was in direct competition in size and price with the far more powerful iPod touch that can do so, so much more. so it inevitably got crushed by the touch. end of story.

that was a fundamental MS strategy blunder. way to go, Steve-O!

 

[vrDrew99]

While (eventually) a technically competent piece of engineering, the Zune was doomed to this fate almost from the word "go."

Why did it take Microsoft until 2006 to introduce an iPod competitor? Were they unaware of the fact that Apple was selling millions of the things? Did they fail to see the threat the iPod represented?

Microsoft also made the mistake of thinking you could focus-group and customer-feedback your way to creating a "hip" product. So they put in an FM radio, and built a business-model around music subscriptions. Things that customers assured researchers they wanted - but somehow weren't reason enough to spend money on.

You also cannot synthesize style in a laboratory. Lets just say that the icky brown color of the first-gen Zune left most people cold. It was the Pontiac Aztec of the mp3 player world.

Lastly, in retrospect Apple's decision to open bricks-and-mortar retail stores appears even more brilliant. In a world where everyone was saying the Internet had made retail dead, Apple recognized the incredible power of having these gleaming, yet friendly, temples to the latest Apple technology. Want to try out a Zune? Sad little displays in Targets and Best Buys.

Microsoft got 85% of things right with the Zune. Unfortunately that is essentially a failing grade when Apple is your schoolmaster.

 

[taraba]

I probably would have tried a Zune if it acted like a flash device when plugged in. As it stood devices (consoles, car stereos, etc) would recognize an iPod and a flash drive. The flash drive has no UI for me to use at my office desk and my car stereo wouldn't play songs off the Zune. So I was kind of forced in to buying an iPod just to get something that I could play my music in both locations without taking two things with me to do it.

 

[Ardrid]

Count me amongst those who truly enjoys their Zune. I have a Zune 80GB and it's interesting that there still aren't any other dedicated media players available that can match the space + features I get in that product. I'm really tempted to grab a Zune HD as a dedicated car mp3 player though; keeping my fingers crossed for a liquidation sale of sorts.

 

[bb-15]

It's too bad that MS gave up on the Zune. But keeping the Zune going would have required not only changing the OS for the device to WP7 but rethinking its approach with mobile devices.

A problem with Microsoft's mobile strategy in the last five years, is that it has been fragmented with different mobile operating systems (Windows Mobile, Kin, WP7, Windows 8) as well as different PC media software (WMP, Zune). Compare this to what Apple had done, having a unified mobile ecosystem with iOS and iTunes.

A unified strategy is the direction that Microsoft needed to go. It's a shame that they didn't do this.

 

[kharms]

This is really too bad. My friend had the 1st generation zoon and loved it. I was ready to buy one myself to replace my iPod Touch as a dedicated music player, but Microsoft never released any updates. As a consumer, it was obvious that Microsoft didn't have a clear strategy for the Zune - was it ever supposed to compete eye-to-eye with the iPod Touch and have full app support? Regardless, this is a prime example of poor marketing and product development that killed a device with wonderful potential.

 

[daemonios]

As a proud owner of a Zune HD, I'm sad that MS has chosen to discontinue such a good product.

I can't for the life of me understand why the Zune was always so US-centric. There was a pontential market for it anywhere else in the world. As it is, I was forced to import my Zune HD to Portugal, via a company in the UK. And I neve got access to Zune Pass or Zune Marketplace.

I know the PMP market is probably not very appealing right now, with everyone moving to smartphones. But I think this product had potential as a non-connected, plain vanilla PMP. For me it's way ahead of the iPod touch in terms of UI and features. And the Zune Software is absolutely the best full-screen media player out there.

Going forward, I'd like to see MS open up the Zune Software to sync music to any portable media, namely phones mounted as external drives. Keep the Marketplace and for chriss' sake bring it to other markets already! It may even be a way to bring people over to the Metro UI and WP7... In fact, now that I think of it, the Zune Software should work beautifully on a Windows8 touch-enabled device - make it the default media player in W8, will ya?