Some thoughts on Microsoft's strategy from a Jupiter analyst....
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Thinking about Zune strategy | August 16, 2006 10:47 AM
I’ve spent a lot of time over the last few days thinking more about Zune and how Microsoft might bring it to market. Part of this was motivated by work going on with our next set of reports related to music and portable media players (we’ve just got some of the first survey data back and it’s very interesting, we know, for example, how many consumers are interested in WiFi in their devices and what they want to use the WiFi for). One of the questions that keeps coming up is what does Microsoft think that they’re going to do differently than Apple. Let’s face it, these folks are waking up every morning, going to work and must have some thought that what they’re going to bring to market will be able to go head to head.
I think there’s a clear strategy. If you look at the feature’s they’ve announced so far as well as the way they did the initial announcement, it seems to me they won’t be going after the mainstream market just yet. Rather, it’s likely we’re going to see Zune focused on the music enthusiast marketplace. The real aficionados who could appreciate features like community or the ability to share music. Look for this to follow the Xbox approach, which targeted the high end gamers early on. It’s likely we won’t see this thing introduced by Steve Ballmer or Bill Gates standing on stage trying to look cool, while some paid celebrity stands on stage looking like a deer caught in the headlights. Nope, this is going to be J Allard, the Microsoft poster boy for looking cool and I think he’ll pull it off well. I’d expect the message will be to try to marginalize the iPod as being the music player that dad, mom or your little sister uses, and Zune is for the cool kids. It’s a risky strategy but it’s better than trying to take Apple on directly head to head in the mainstream market. Of course, I also expect Cupertino might have a response or two of their own. |
