invbiznews.com — Apple thus greeted IBM into the desktop PC marketplace with a rather tongue in cheek full-page advert in the Wall Street Journal. Little did Apple guess at the time, but the IBM PC and its gaggle of clones, would later spell disaster for Apples unchallenged reign.The press were initially kind to Zune, but recently seem to have tired of it and start
Nov 14, 2006 View in Crawl 4
s_m_a_c_kNov 14, 2006
Fairplay?
flag564Nov 14, 2006
It's nothing that was unexpected. Many of these press outlets are very 'Apple friendly. Many of their reporters use Apple machines and products and RARELY ever write anything negative about them. Do you think that they were going to let a product from their #1 favorite company be threatened by their #1 favorite company to hate? Absolutely not!I wrote months ago (As if MS was going to read it) that they were not going to get a fair shake in the press, and that they should go over their heads and right to the consumers. They should run a huge ad blitz, and go out to outlets where they can speak directly to the people without the Apple friendly filter that you would have to go through if you just left it up to the press to get the word out. It looks like they are going to do just that and it will help them out greatly. with 58% of ipod users willing to use a Zune, they will make a lot of headway.
openallhoursNov 14, 2006
It is good to see MS and Apple back in the boxing ring. Maybe they should both follow Sun's example and open up the DRM under GPL.Still here in Europe we've got diesel or Petrol for our cars and that doesn't seem to worry people too much. Plenty of both, you just choose the one you want at purchase - after that you're stuck with either Petrol or Diesel. Maybe 'both' Apple and MS's DRMs can survive the same way - though I'd like to choose a player up front from other maybe.
papabNov 14, 2006
"The 30Gb hard disk is OK but paltry when squared up against Apple?s 60Gb top of the rage device."Apple's "top of the rage" iPod has a 80GB capacity.
ebernetNov 14, 2006
The Zune WILL play all the music you ripped yourself on iTunes, either MP3 or AAC - so not all is lost, just what you bought from the Apple Store...As for flag564's comments - plenty of people are giving the Zune a "fair shake". The issue is not one of mindless railing on the product [Zune], it is just that the Zune is, as a 1.0 product, wholly inferior to anything out there right now trying to compete with the iPod. It cannot match up in features and flexibility to many of the Plays For Sure products out there, it does not "Play For Sure" itself, it will not even play MSFTs native WAV format, imposes bizarre transfer restrictions with it's greatest feature the Squirting of songs - that needs to be determined on a case by case basis.For Microsoft to have made a difference, they needed to spend another year making it the best product they could, continuously building the hype up and leaking out little features (which are not there now). Unfortunately, most first impressions are the lasting ones - and at that, Microsoft will fail to keep customers on the Zune.I am curious to see what the next few weeks bring.