Sometimes you see a gadget come on the market and know already that its time has passed. What might have been a perfectly fine piece of kit six months ago gets eclipsed by changes in fashion, developer interest, lower cost rivals or a poor marketing campaign. It happens. We had a reminder of that over the weekend as Microsoft quietly retired the Zune brand – which had been scaled back to a streaming music service renamed Groove Music – and with it any memory of the device intended to kill the iPod at a time when Apple was getting ready to preview the iPhone.
IPhone aside, Microsoft would have struggled in the personal media player (PMP) space. Until 2007 any PMP that wasn’t an iPod was enjoying niche status thanks to the dominance of iTunes in the streaming music space. No matter that Creative, iRiver, Sony, Archos etc were developing fine alternatives, for as long as you had to download through a slow connection or scan your CDs to your PC before uploading to your media player you weren’t going to be more than a bit player capable of holding your own but not much else. Apple made digital easy in a way the competition did not.
As a devoted Apple user I have a lot of sympathy for the Zune. Microsoft had a solidly made device with an interface that was to become the first step towards the Windows Modern UI; it had a store to back it up; and the ability to ‘squirt’ songs/pictures/videos to your friends over Wi-Fi, giving them a whole three days to enjoy at their leisure – on their own Zunes.
Unfortunately, as a devoted Apple user, I have no sympathy for a device that looked a lot like a fifth generation iPod and a little like a Creative Zen. Bear in mind this was 2006, ‘peak media player’ and the iPhone was about to make touch screens de rigueur for any handheld device. The Zune was flares in a skinny jeans market. It sold badly and so failed to make anything of the social features that put it over the iPod in functionality.
I don’t think anyone in Microsoft is going to remember the mid-00s with much fondness. Between a failed media player in the Zune, a dud operating system in Vista and a CEO in Steve Ballmer that publicly laughed off the iPhone.
But that time is gone now and Microsoft is a different entity under Satya Nadella with his emphasis on personal productivity over pure products and service offerings. We have exciting products like Windows 10, the Surface, Surface Book, Azure, HoloLens, Band, and… um… Lumia.
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