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Reading Infinite Games, they tell an anecdote about a Microsoft exec on a flight telling an Apple exec that the Zune was a way better portable music player than
by derwiki 1mo ago
Reading Infinite Games, they tell an anecdote about a Microsoft exec on a flight telling an Apple exec that the Zune was a way better portable music player than the iPod. The Apple exec was just “yup, you’re probably right” and then soon after the iPhone dropped
- kccqzy 1mo agoThat just sounds like a standard introvert response when one doesn’t want to walk.
- mikestew 1mo agoMight want to edit, as this would make sense/be amusing if the exec in the last sentence was Apple. That, or I can’t read.
- derwiki 1mo agoYou got it, thank you!
- troupo 1mo agoZune was probably a better player. It was too late, and arrived when MS didn't much care. There are emails unearthed in various lawsuits where you can read Bill Gates screaming at his subordinates: "why the hell can't our partners like Sony and Creative create a similar device? Give them all, give them early access to everything, work with them". In the end MS felt compelled to make their own.
- bayindirh 1mo agoSony can't be bothered to compete with Apple in that era. They were trying to recover from their DRM dreams, and their devices were already sounding great with in-house software and hardware. Creative's Muvo^2 already was the poor man's iPod with surprisingly good audio quality as well.
- cptskippy 1mo agoI feel like this completely misses the mark. Audio quality was never the compelling feature of the iPod and people weren't clamoring for it because it sounded good. When the iPod came out you largely had two options for carrying your music collection on the go. You either carried a binder of CDs, or you had some niche player like Mini-Disc or an MP3 player. Both alternatives were expensive and had limitations similar to a CD in terms of number of tracks you could carry. I had an MP3 player on either side of 2000 that was slightly smaller than a deck of playing cards that could use Smart Media flash memory cards. The largest card at the time was either 16 or 32mb and was enough to hold 1 album at near CD quality. Creative's Muvo was a weird form factor that was larger than an iPod. It had a horrid interface both on device and for loading music. It's only grace was that it was slightly cheaper than an iPod and didn't need a Mac with FireWire. Although iircc this was pre USB 2.0 so not having FireWire would mean loading music took forever and a day. The iPod allowed you to carry most, if not all, of your music collection in a package slightly larger than a deck of playing cards. And it had a fantastic interface for navigating music on the device. This was at a time before most people had laptops and if you had a PC it was at home and used sparingly. The iPod was such a compelling mobile computing device that it drove adoption of the iMac. Apple would eventually release iTunes for Windows and USB support but that was many years later.
- thewebguyd 1mo ago> I had an MP3 player on either side of 2000 that was slightly smaller than a deck of playing cards that could use Smart Media flash memory cards. The largest card at the time was either 16 or 32mb and was enough to hold 1 album at near CD quality. I had something similar. The storage was the iPod's killer feature, along with iTune's $0.99 songs. Suddenly you no longer had to buy whole albums, and you didn't have to swap out what was on your MP3 player every day when you wanted a different playlist. A 5GB hard drive in your pocket was a huge innovation then.
- fckgw 1mo ago"1000 songs in your pocket" was the entire driving force behind the thing. It was constantly bellowed in the marketing and it's what Steve Jobs demanded of the engineering team from day one. The size and the storage were paramount and they knew no one else could match it.
- cosmic_cheese 1mo ago> Zune was probably a better player. In some ways, anyway. Never owned a Zune myself, but a university classmate did and I was shocked by how poorly it handled non-Latin languages… she had a ton of Japanese and Korean songs loaded onto it, and their metadata all displayed as "missing character" blocks. She used it a lot like one might use an iPod Shuffle despite it having a nice screen because the only way to tell what was playing was by hearing it play. By contrast my 4th gen B&W iPod which was about 5-6 years older handled unicode just fine.
- VCFundedGenYer 1mo agoIIRC the Zune had a much better DAC on the device than any ipod. I own two of them and the sound quality was always notably great.
- unsupp0rted 1mo agoIt let you squirt over a song to your friend https://youtu.be/ud6rwVkbovA https://youtu.be/ud6rwVkbovA And they could listen to it 3 times in 3 days
- ralfd 1mo ago“Squirting” was ridiculed at the time and the word itself scaring away women. Jobs killed it then in an interview with a classic quote: Microsoft = Cold tech and Apple = Humanity. MS scares her away, Apple gets the girl. > QUESTION: Microsoft has announced its new iPod competitor, Zune. It says that this device is all about building communities. Are you worried? > Steve Jobs: In a word, no. I’ve seen the demonstrations on the Internet about how you can find another person using a Zune and give them a song they can play three times. It takes forever. By the time you’ve gone through all that, the girl’s got up and left! You’re much better off to take one of your earbuds out and put it in her ear. Then you’re connected with about two feet of headphone cable.
- lotsofpulp 1mo agoBecause why would Sony go out on a limb and take all that risk for tiny hardware margins just so Microsoft could grab the lion’s share of margins with software licensing fees?
- nxobject 1mo agoHell hath no fury like Apple Global Security scorned...
- VCFundedGenYer 1mo agoTo be fair, the Zune actually was a better media player than the ipod in almost every way. That wasn't a false statement. The issue was the abysmal marketing and "me too" attitude Microsoft had (and still has).
- wat10000 1mo agoIt was better in every way you can quantify in a tech specs listing, and not in any way that actually matters to the customer.
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- aatd86 1mo agome still thinking about the iRiver H320 I was lusting after...
- stillpointlab 1mo ago100% - the iPod wasn't just good enough, it was more than enough for almost everyone. The Zune was firmly in the diminishing returns category by the time it came out.
- compiler-guy 1mo agoYep. To overcome an incumbent that sells a very good product and has momentum, it is almost never enough to be somewhat better. You have to be "knock my socks off" better. The Zune may have been somewhat better (until the nano and iphone), but it wasn't enough better to overcome the ecosystem switching costs.
- georgel 1mo agoI had the OG white Zune. It was the same price as an iPod ~$250. The reason I chose Zune was the Zune Pass. A precursor to Spotify. Plus growing up in the Seattle area, I knew other people who had them and we would trade songs.
- bingo-bongo 1mo agoSimon Sinek - Apple vs Microsoft: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=jEOftmUJ6a4 https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=jEOftmUJ6a4 But it had nothing to do with the iPod/iPhone release in his story. (story starts ~1:15, but I highly recommend the entire talk)
- mark_l_watson 1mo agoI loved the book The Infinite Game. Really changed how I looked at work, personal research, and being an author. Recommended!
- shuwix 1mo agoActually, Microsoft came with "modern" smart phone much sooner. Actually too soon, technology wasn't there (price, computing power, size, weight, battery life). Apple never came first ... but often just at the right moment and had marketing skills to make it a new trend.
- __alexs 1mo agoWindows CE (1996) was garbage compared to Palm OS (also 1996.)
- NoMoreNicksLeft 1mo ago>Apple never came first ... but often just at the right moment and had marketing skills to make it a new trend. Newton.
- simondotau 1mo agoFun fact: the Newton was the first mobile device to use an ARM CPU.
- skrebbel 1mo agoI'm the opposite of an Apple fanboy (typing this on a Windows box), but this is some grade A nonsense. Sure, MS launched PDAs and phone-ish devices long ago, running Windows CE and whatnot but they were awful. It's absolute bollocks that the iPhone was a splashing success because of Apple marketing. It was a splashing success because it worked spectacularly well. Random non-tech people would randomly pull out their newest purchase to show their friends. "And now it's a notepad!" "Look and now suddenly it's a calculator!" Sure, your awful HP Tablet had all that, and a call function, well before. But it sucked. It felt like using a computer while squinting, and not like a magic calculator that can turn into a notepad and then into a phone and then into an iPod. The iPhone was a success because it worked so well. And it worked so well because the technology was there - in part because they invented it and in part because they had the taste to not bring out a shit product but wait a bit instead.
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- adventured 1mo agoThe anecdote is likely a false rip of the actual story: [2017] Speaking at an event Tuesday, Scott Forstall, who lead Apple's iOS software division under Jobs, recounted the surprising history behind the company's first touchscreen prototype, which ultimately lead to the first iPhone. It all began, Forstall said, because Jobs had an acquaintance at Microsoft who he really, really, didn't like. "It began because Steve hated this guy at Microsoft," Forstall said during the event. "Any time Steve had any interaction with the guy, he'd come back pissed off." The unnamed Microsoft exec, who was apparently the husband of a friend of Jobs' wife, apparently bragged so much it pushed Jobs over the edge. "He just shoved it in Steve's face -- the way they were going to rule the world with their new tablets with their pens. He came in on Monday with a set of expletives and then was like 'let's show them how it's really done.' " https://mashable.com/article/scott-forstall-steve-jobs-microsoft-grudge https://mashable.com/article/scott-forstall-steve-jobs-micro...
- meowface 1mo agoSpite cam actually be one of the most powerful motivators for productivity, in my own experience. I can buy this story being accurate.
- astrange 1mo agoIn Steve's case "fueled by spite" would be more precisely "borderline personality disorder". If you read him in that lens it might help distinguish how to be successful like him without all of the bad parts.
- ziofill 1mo agoIMHO the iPod nano (the little puck with a touchscreen that you could clip on stuff) was the best player I ever had.