Zune breaks 2 million sold, stealing market from Creative not Apple
By Paul Miller 
posted May 10th 2008 2:38PM
posted May 10th 2008 2:38PM
posted May 10th 2008 2:38PM
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You mean people who are over 25, and who DON'T mooch off their parents?
@Eddy Alvarez: Are you sure about that? It's certainly not who they're marketing to.
Hey I've got 2 Zunes, and I see people with them almost everyday. I see about 2 new people every week in my school with one, and each week there will be another 2 people that get them (on average). I can already see their market share growing (at least in my school).. Hopefully it will be more like this in the rest of the world when the Zune goes global
Well, I do keep an eye out. I see about 90% iPods and the rest are not Zunes (creatice, SanDisk, Sony, etc. I have seen exactly one Zune in the wild, a .Net software engineer at my company has one. All the rest of the developers have iPods and iPhones, and a fair number of them have Macs...
Seriously. I have a friend who says he's never seen anyone with a Zune, but then again, he is legally blind. But he also said his seeing eye dog, Rex, told him he hasn't seen one either.
It's been said that you can see thousands of Zunes up in the Seattle area. Bill Gates hands them out at his mansion on Halloween day for trick or treat. The thing is, the Zune isn't the treat.
I've never seen anyone with a Zune either. Seriously.
I'm starting to suspect that at least a million of those 2+ million sold are found only on the streets of Redmond.
janitor at my school has a zune
my 2 cents
Zune 80 user here, and love it. Of course, I don't walk around holding it in my hand all day. I'll usually have it hooked up to my car stereo, or I'll pull it out of my pocket to put a specific playlist on, then it goes back into the pocket.
I don't know what "seeing one" has to do with anything...unless I need to stare at it the whole day, holding it within torso region, just to listen to music. But that really makes it hard to get any work done, so I don't do that.
last week, i turned on the wireless on my zune and found 4 others in the same room with zunes, there may have been more ipods, but they couldnt share their music,pictures, and video, it may only be three listens but its better than nothing!
Take that wierd Zune tattoo guy.
What an absurd article.
How about trying to match apples to apples instead of total market share of mp3 players?
That's like comparing the iphone to all other cellular phones. Engadget have any market share numbers for the iphone world wide? I'm guessing it's somewhere in the neighborhood of 0.001% off all cellular phones.
Exactly. Let's see some numbers about per-quarter shipments/sales or something of that nature.
Yeah Engadget, why don't you find the iPhones total global marketshare and post it? I'm pretty sure when you compare it with Nokia's total domination of the market, it will be highly laughable.
Infact, I bet that the manufacturers of those chinese knockoffs that you guys are always posting about have more global marketshare than the iPhone!
Nokia had better start praying to it's Norse gods or whatever, that Apple doesn't decide to go into the cellphone business in all price ranges, because Nokia's stock would probably collapse in six months. Of course, Apple has more sense than that to compete with the Dell of the cellphone business.
Selling $25 handsets to third-world countries isn't much of a profit-making business. Nokia is going to start trying to sell more handsets in North America. Good luck with them on that. They better start figuring how to sell more smartphones up there in icy Finland after Apple introduces the 3G iPhone in that region. That'll be the Finnish of Nokia. Oh, I meant finish of Nokia.
Steffen, I'll let you know that Nokia makes most of their money from the cheap phones and don't even try to tell me that there's not a lot of money in that. Have you seen their profits reports?
Apple will never be a threat to Nokia and that's just plain and simple fact. working up from the 0% global marketshare of Apple to the 40% of Nokia would be a simply huge task that would cost billions. Nokia have NOTHING to worry about. Besides, they still have the best featured phones available in the western world.
Umm, the difference between the Zune and the iPhone? The iPhone is successful and the Zune is not. The iPhone's market share is growing much faster than the Zune's. Moron.
Andrew Danks ... why let facts get in the way of your argument?
282 MILLION cellular handsets were shipped in Q1 2008. Total iPhones sold worldwide in Q1? How about 1.7m? Since you seem to struggle with math let me help you out - that's 0.6% of the entire cellular phone market.
Then you make another brilliant statement that the market share for the iPhone is growing at a quicker rate than the Zune. Wrong again genius. Total volume for the iPhone dropped 26% from Q4 2007 to Q1 2008 as did global market share from 0.7% to the now 0.6%.
If you read the above article you would see that Zune's marketshare has INCREASED as opposed to iPhones which has DECREASED.
With all of the iPhone posts (at least 1/day) you would think Engadget might want to report Q1 numbers. Somehow they miss this news and decide instead to bash the Zune despite the fact that there is some growth.
why don't YOU compare apples to apples and compare the iphone to each specific model of phone being sold instead of comparing it to the whole cellphone market...
ROFL, good job comparing sales of a DAP to sales of a cellphone. Although DAPs and cellphones are becoming more and more integrated, the Zune and the iPhone are in two different markets.
My N95 does everything I need, and with a 12GB memory card I have plenty of space to use it as my mp3 player. The only negative would be the battery life but it's a small price to pay for such a good package; I doubt i'll ever buy another standalone music player, smartphones FTW.
This is exactly why Nokia are the number 1 Mp3 player manufacturer and camera manufacturer in the world, although they don't make any standalone Mp3 players and cameras.
Amazing, isn't it?
I've only got an N80 and have the say that I'll never be able to go back to a basic mobile phone...
the iphone is used more for uploading photos to flickr than the n95
Joy division FTW!!
really, am I the only person who recognized the engraving?
Yes.
that's a shame.
No, you're not - you're probably just the only person who didn't notice it a few weeks ago when they originally posted it (their concept of what the 'joy division zune' might look like).
quit hatin' on the zune..competition is good..
why did he get low ranked? He's right, competition creates better products at lower prices.
apparantly lots of people on engadget are convinced that competition is horrible and that everyone should just let apple own everything.
Keep in mind the zune is just available in a few markets unlike the ipod which is technically sold anywhere.
I have never seen the zune out in the wild either. Who knew Microsoft employs 2 million people.
Yeah I doubt MS employees are included in this, as they probably wouldn't be seen as "sales numbers" if MS never sold them to their employees and just gave 'em away. So yeah, your theory about MS hiring 2 million people to use Zunes is false.
Well, Microsoft doesn't actually see sales as actual sales.
They count a sale as something that has been shipped, but not sold.
For all you know there may be 1.5 million Zunes in some store rotting away.
If the next update has Chinese language support, then I'd probably getting one. I mean, Zune has been out for a while, just wonder why Microsoft hasn't supported more languages? It shouldn't be that hard for Microsoft to address that problem imo. Well, I'm glad that Apple did it in the right way at the first place.
Because there target market is America, where barely anyone speaks Chinese.
I'm glad it's making progress. I like mine.
I think they were saying it has not really made much progress.
Had my Zune for close to a year and LOVE the machine but HATE the software for the 'puter. MOST user-unfriendly, imho. I would never recommend buying a Zune because of it.
My thoughts exactly, you have to go through hell to get to the good stuff, actually using the player.
As for this news, I think it's nice. Microsoft is in this for the long haul. If it takes years for them to build up serious competition against Apple, so be it. It's past time for their quasi-monopoly to die.
+1
I really really like the Zune player itself, but the computer-side software is the absolute frickin pits. I used to think iTunes for Windows was absolute crap until I started using the Zune program. *barf*! it's absolutely awful. Typical MS though, do something 90% great, 10% so spectacularly awful as to undo everything else good about it.
Give MS a chance on the software front!
Anyone else remember trying to use an iPod with a PC pre-iTunes - total nightmare.
agreed. I tried the zune software on my pc and it was completely non-user friendly. It was actually the reason I got an iPod at the time.
The only problem I have had with the Zune software is a bit of lag when first starting it. The hardware more than makes up for it... That and sometimes editing things doesn't work, but I find pressing Enter makes it work no matter what.
Overall, if you're looking for a new player, don't listen to people claiming that the software is horrid enough to make it not worth it, because thats pretty much just bull.
I guess this tells us the size of the Apple-hater market compared to market at large.
Make that 2 million +1. I'm getting one as soon as my ipod dies (pretty soon, flimsy little thing!). I HATE itunes - worst media software I have had the misfortune of using, and yes I have used a lot. Typical Apple product, all looks no substance, but after years of grey and white minimalism, guess im sick and its more like no-looks-no-substance. /end rant.
iTunes is all looks no substance, huh?
Well, be prepared to be disappointed with the Zune desktop software. Ratings? barely. Smart platlists? Nope. MP3 tag editing? Nope. It pretty much does nothing outside of simple playback and offers nothing to power users, but it is very pretty to look at.
Not to mention, Microsoft completely changed the Zune desktop software between versions 1.0 and 2.0, redefining the UI and removing key features in the process. I can't imagine how frustrating it must be to the few people who have invested their time into the Zune ecosystem (or other WMP/PlaysForSure systems) only to have Microsoft repeatedly pull the rug out from under them. Buyer beware.
@mark
Don't forget (in 2.5):
- Gapless Playback
- Social Networking
- - Subscribe to friends' ZuneCards (in software and on device)
- - Auto-download most recent songs/top artists/etc from friends if you have ZunePass
- - Badges/Rankings (top listeners for artist/album)
- - XNA Games for Zune (via XNA Game Studio 3.0 now in CTP)
What an amazing accomplishment. For a "me too" product, selling 2 million is a huge win against the partners that MS has royally stabbed in the back. The Zune had many cutting edge updates and revisions recently. By adding color and etchings it really pushed the sales mark over the top. Copying features already present on iPods was a bonus. No wonder the entertainment division at MS was so proud to announce their profitability this quarter. The Zune certainly is a game changing product for them.
hmm and what features did it copy again? ability for anyone to write their own games and distribute them freely? Or maybe the features that were already present in the first version of the software that they added back? Or were you talking about the integration of zune cards into the zune itself so you can keep track of friends on it? Oops, guess you made a completly baseless statement