Matt Rosoff, writing on Cnet today, reports Microsoft’s increasingly irrelevant claim that the Zune is not dead – at least, not yet.
It’s irrelevant because, given the latest disastrous sales numbers, it’s now clear that the moment for the Zune device to make any sort of impact in the digital music business has passed. The battle over digital music is moving on.
Steve Ballmer all but admitted that the Zune was history when I asked him about it earlier this month.
As he pointed out, stand-alone media players are no longer a growth market. They’re being superseded by mobiles with music, and by all-singing, all-dancing smartphones. And Microsoft, he insisted, was not about to come out with a ZunePhone. It’s smartphone strategy will continue to rest instead on providing software and services for other companies’ devices.
So Zune’s next life (if there is one) will rest on the success of the Zune software player, planted on other pieces of hardware, and on Zune Social, which was meant to do for Zune what Xbox Live has done for the games console: build an online community around the brand.
Will it work? Microsoft’s best hope is that it can build a coalition against Apple. Of course, it tried that before with its “Plays for Sure” campaign, only to jettison the approach when it came up with Zune in the first place, so there is likely to be lingering distrust. Still, it makes more sense than relying on the Zune to outsell the iPod.
This doesn’t mean that there will be no more Zune MP3 players. It just means that noone need care much anymore.
