Subscribe
With only 2 millions Zunes sold to date since they went on sale in November 2006 it looks like Microsoft’s plan has “no bragging rights.” The plan? The plan that was to take on the iPod and Apple head to head instead of the PlaysForSure partnership.
In fact it appears that the Zune is mostly taking sales from Creative a former PlaysForSure partner, not Apple or second-place SanDisk.
Zune sales look like a total flatline. Apple sold more iPods in on month last quarter than Microsoft sold Zune since it was introduced in 2006.
Microsoft sold its first million using solely the pioneering 30GB model, but since the past November has been selling two inexpensive flash-based models as well as two hard drive players, indicating slow growth with little effect on the market for its broader product range. If this is not a failure, I do not know what you would call it.
Microsoft has been pretty quiet with actually sales numbers and I find it ironic that with these dismal sales figures they were still way slow in introducing more features like TV shows, podcasts, smart playlists or even audiobooks into the Zune line.
These sales results leave Microsoft with just a tiny fraction of Apple’s US market share and with comparatively slow development. Microsoft is watching the iPod and now the iPhone fly past their player with wi-fi music store, mobile Safari, widgets, email, etc. with no answer in sight. Microsoft barely has 4 percent of the market for MP3 players.
Creative, has dropped from four to two percent marketshare year-over-year. SanDisk is in second place with only 11 percent. Stats are from the NPD Group.
Apple in its latest quarter sold 10.6 million iPods, or more than five times Microsoft’s cumulative sales to date and is now the number one reseller of music in the U.S. with their iTunes Store. On January 22, 2008, Apple reported they had sold over 140M iPods to date.
So I ask “Where is the social?”
