Comments on: How the Zune will (eventually) kill the iPod

By: Jon Norwood

Jon Norwood — Wed, 29 Nov 2006 08:07:16 +0000

Brown is an awesome choice for a MP3 player.

Besides, all those assertions you made are when Microsoft was somewhat young and agile – now they are just old, dorky, and clueless.

By: un1xl0ser

un1xl0ser — Tue, 28 Nov 2006 23:12:21 +0000

Your comparisons don’t work, the results are not conclusive, and you do not have a good understanding about what these products are.

Should we assume from your statement that C# is more popular than Java and Perl? Should we assume that Sendmail and Exchange have even close functionality and are competing with each other? Shal we assume that Netscape is destroyed, and ignore the fact that Phoenix/Firefox rose from it’s ashes?

Sheesh.

By: Ingjerd

Ingjerd — Mon, 27 Nov 2006 10:12:44 +0000

Very interesting comments you’ve got there.

Have you read Schumpeter? He wrote theory on innovation and entrepreneurship. Essentially, at first he thought it was the stand-alonge entrepreneur that would drive innovation and business cycles (Schumpeter Mark I), but later changed his mind to thinking it was the big corporations (i.e. Microsoft) that would drive business cycles due to market power/capital they can “catch up” quicker when they see a new trend becoming big (and they don’t even need to go for anything before concepts have been proofed (eg. “people like mp3 players”)….

I guess another example here would be the Xbox vs. Playstation/Nintendo? Was the first Xbox better than Nintendo/Playstation? I think not….

By: gian

gian — Mon, 27 Nov 2006 05:05:17 +0000

you are forgeting that people are lazy and will use what ever is put in front of them that is how microsoft did so well in most of the products you mentioned. they just bundled them with the machines. that won’t work with the zune.

By: thatedeguy

thatedeguy — Mon, 27 Nov 2006 03:59:21 +0000

That's a great breakdown. I had forgotten about the lotus/Excel as well as the exchange bits. Check out http://www.thatedeguy.com/archives/2006/11/ipod-perception-vs-zune-reality for more on the zune/ipod bit. I really think that both of us have a pretty good point on this and might just end up being right.