Thursday, October 17, 2013

The Ipod Killer?


     Today we will talk about the Zune, a portable music player created by Microsoft. I know many of you probably do not even remember this device ever releasing. This handset was supposed to be revolutionary and the answer to the groundbreaking apple ipod witch released in 2001. Though popularity grew large with the ipod, the Zune on the other hand, had a difficult time launching off the ground (November 2006). Holiday 2008 comes and reportedly 85 million dollars worth of Zunes were sold, where as apple reached up about 100million dollars more, making the grand total of the ipod reaching 185million dollars in that particular holiday season alone. Eventually Microsoft discontinued the device in 2011, understanding their mistakes and knowingly they could not compete with the ipod.  
dek      Customer behavior was simple here. People just did not get the device, they could not see why they would switch over if they already own an ipod, what was the point? The features and price were very similar and coming into the race 5 years late was a huge disadvantage. The ipod world and society had already boomed and took over the glob. This was the main external influence in the purchase or none-purchase of the Zune. Internally, like I said before consumers did not see the benefits of owning this device. I would probably say people were emotionally detached from this product. There were minor differences in hardware and software and the overall marketing/advertising for the Zune was just plain bad. It was smart for them to discontinue it, or else it would have burdened them much more pain and lost in the long run.

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