Not Zune enough
Microsoft has announced it won't be producing anymore Zune MP3 players after a five year effort to challenge Apple's pre-eminence in that market.
"We recently announced that, going forward, Windows Phone will be the focus of our mobile music and video strategy, and that we will no longer be producing Zune players," said a Zune support bulletin, first publicised by winrumors.
It really was just a matter of time and, while it's easy to deride Microsoft for, once more, failing in an attempt to take on Apple in the mobile device market, at least Microsoft gave it a go. But in retrospect Apple's momentum was just too strong with the iPod, and it was too difficult to come up with USPs to tempt punters away.
Furthermore, Microsoft decided to get into the MP3 player game just as the convergent mobile device market was about to explode, thanks to the launch of the iPhone. Such is the omnipotence of the modern smartphone that it's debatable whether there remains much of a market for stand-alone MP3 players, or cameras, satnavs and handheld gamers, for that matter. In fact, we wouldn't be surprised to see Apple dramatically scaling-down its iPod offering in favour of the iPhone at this afternoon's launch event.
The announcement above pretty much acknowledges that fact and, in our view, the Zune player programme has effectively been a testing ground for Microsoft's cloud media store services for some time now. The Zune functionality and stores in WP7 phones should be thought of as a definite value-add and, in that respect, the Zune has not been a complete failure.
But then again we said similar stuff about the ill-fated Kin, and the automatic cloud sync technology it was designed to utilise, but there has been little sign of that technology in WP7 phones. Anyway, the long and short of it is, as the Mango update rolls-out across the tens of WP7 handsets around the world, Microsoft has gone all-in on WP7 for all handheld devices, and not a moment too soon.
