Questions abound about Zune vs. iPod Survey
TUAW's nerdy (yet surprisingly well off) little sister Blogging Stocks has a great roundup of articles regarding a recent ABI Research survey that purportedly showed 58% of consumers would choose a Microsoft Zune over an iPod. In the study, people were shown an image of the Zune, and then asked how likely they would be to purchase the device over another music player. According to Blogging Stocks, ABI mentions only that it compared the picture of the Zune to "other competitive media players," with no specific mention that the iPod was actually given as an option.
As soon as I saw the news about this, I was immediately suspicious. The fact that Apple essentially has control over the MP3 player market combined with early reports from multiple tech journalists that the Zune is flawed in more ways than one, led many to believe that perhaps the ABI hadn't been truly upfront when conducting their survey and reporting the results. I too would choose a Zune over, say, a Creative device; it would probably be a neat little device to hack; but that doesn't mean that I, nor likely 80% of the population would choose the brown device from Redmond over our beloved iPods.
