Zune Fail? No Surprise.

When I woke up this morning, I was greeted by the news that every single 1st-gen 30gb Zune had completely and utterly frozen up. I personally do not own a Zune (or an iPod for that matter) nor do I know anyone who does (makes me wonder who all of these angry Zune users are) but it definitely seems that the Web is aglow about this.

It’s a case of global schadenfreude, not so much at the Zune users, who have a legitimate reason for being very upset, but at Microsoft. After all, they made the player and it appears that it was a software issue that caused it to fail. Considering all Microsoft does is write software, the fact that they shipped a product with such a lethal bug speaks very lowly to the company.

But what did anyone expect? From day one the Zune was an iPod rip off released by a software company with an inferior record of security and stability than Apple. This is highlighted by the fact that Apple charges 2 times more for their computers than a similar Windows machine, but people are still snatching them up.

One has to wonder what those who bought the Zune were thinking at the time. It’s price and functionality were almost identical to the iPod, the latter being battle-tested and generally well-regarded. There were no new features that really made worth buying, no serious cost cuts and nothing to be gained (unless you got a great deal).

The Zune was, and pretty much still is, an attempt to compete with the iPod without doing anything better than it. The problem is that, when you’re entering a cornered market, it isn’t good enough to be equal to your competitor, you need to be better, faster and cheaper.

Sadly, Microsoft couldn’t do any of those things. In fact, it couldn’t even make the blasted thing work for four years.

Old Habits

You can tell that Microsoft has gotten a little bit too used to being number one. It’s operating system market share has made the company lazy and signs of this are written all over it’s recent products.

Think about it. Windows Vista is a bomb. IE 8, even in beta, is widely panned. The latest Microsoft Office has been blasted. It’s MSN search keep sinking and it seems that nothing they’ve done has worked remotely according to plan.

Apple is gaining ground in the CPU market, Firefox is grabbing market share in the browser wars and Microsoft is eating Google’s dust in the search arena. How they’ve managed to hold on to their share of the office application market is amazing, but I think it’s largely owed to the failings of the OpenOffice project to actually turn out a viable competitor.

However, the clearest illustration that Microsoft never escaped the “We’re number one because we’re Microsoft” mentality was with the Zune itself. iPod had been out a full five years when the Zune was released and was on its fifth generation. Apple had practically cornered the MP3 player market. Microsoft decided it wanted a piece of the action and decided to break into it with what fundamentally amounted to an iPod knock off with the same features and same price, but with the Microsoft name.

Great.

Granted, Zunes have never sold as bad as people like me would like to joke, but it hardly turned out to be an iPod killer either. According to Wikipedia, the source of all great misinformation, the Zune had sold approximately 2 million units by June but Apple had sold over 150 million iPods at about the same time. Even with the head start, that hurts.

It’s hard to say whether or not the great Y2K9 Zune crash will be the nail in the coffin for this decidedly mediocre product, but one would certainly hope so.

Time for a Slaughter

It’s time for Microsoft to realize something. You can’t let others out-innovate you and expect customers to beat down your door just because you’re Microsoft. The fact that they’ve lasted this long is a sign of exactly how entrenched they were, but the shelling on all sides combined with their own screw ups has weakened their position and cracks are showing.

It’s time for Microsoft to cut the crap, get back to basics and stop releasing “me too” products. Let Apple have the MP3 player market, stop trying to be an ad network and for the sake of all that is good in the world, quit it with the search engine. It is past time for Microsoft to stop spreading their resources too thin and get back to doing what they do well, whatever that is.

I’d much rather have a good version of Windows than a search engine that may, with years worth of work, be almost as good as Google. It is time for Microsoft to admit this addiction, recognize that they’ve spread themselves too thin, released too many garbage products that have hurt both their relationship with their customers and their image as an invincible giant.

Admit your mistakes, get back to basics and move on. It’s time to grow up and recognize your own mortality. You can move into new markets when the house you live in has been fixed up.

Bottom Line

The bottom line is simple. Microsoft is quickly earning reputation for poorly made products. If this keeps up, in the tech world, the Microsoft hologram could become the same as a “Made in China” sticker.

However, the only way to create quality is to invest heavily in it and that means focusing in on what’s important. The more products Microsoft adds and the more things they try to become, the less time gets spent on each one.

Do one thing, do it well and THEN try to do something else too. Otherwise, all of your houses just start to fall apart.