Nice move.
Just to balance my Microsoft karma, I was very pleasantly surprised by this story in Gizmodo around the launch of the new Zune players.
Instead of leaving their best customers (the ones who bought the original Zune) in their dust, Microsoft went ahead and gave ALL OF THE NEW features available in the new Zune 2 to original Zune 1 owners through a software upgrade.
This is brilliant on a whole bunch of different levels, but I love it mostly because it hints that Microsoft – a software company – is starting to understand that the value in music devices lives in THE SOFTWARE TOO!!!
As I wrote in this post, I think Microsoft needs to learn from Sony’s mistakes and find a different way to compete.
OK, but what’s not so brilliant is how this launch was handled. There are a number of features here: automatic wifi sync, or sync with media center content, which were just plain flubbed.
I mean, these are amazing features which, had they been surrounded by even half decent marketing or even better made cooler through additional services, would have killed ipod. For example, imagine a service that tied wifi syncing to your friends’ recommendations. It could automatically sync tracks rated highly by your friends to your device. Just that small feature would turn welcome to the social into something meaningful
We’re sitting here at Zeus Jones talking about this and it’s heartbreaking because there’s so much opportunity here…sigh.