Steve Job's view on Microsoft's Zune

Tuesday, October 03, 2006

In an online interview with Newsweek Steve Jobs had the chance to express his view on Microsoft’s iPod rival: Zune. The Apple CEO said that he is not worried by Zune and Microsoft attempt to use community building to take market shares away from his company.

One of the main features of Zune is in fact the possibility to share music and playlists with up to three other Zune users. This is achieved via a Wi-fi connection and the latter is exactly one of the reasons why the Microsoft gadget will not succeed.

Jobs said that he saw an Internet demonstration of how the entire process (finding a person plus sharing the file) works and he is not impressed, to say the least. The CEO said that “It takes forever. By the time you've gone through all that, the girl's got up and left!”.

The best solution to share a song, Jobs added, would be to “take one of your earbuds out and put it in her ear”. Even if you resort to this old school approach however, as the CEO noted, sharing would be limited to the length of the cables.

As for the possibility to lose customers because of the freshness or coolness of Zune, Jobs said that Apple doesn’t create products thinking about this. The goal of every project is to “make the best products we can and if they are cool, well, that’s great”.

Aside from the obvious answer to the question about being impressed Jobs’s point about the sharing process is certainly interesting. By gambling so much on the sharing side of the player Microsoft must make sure that the process is as streamlined and fast as possible.

In this era of quick access to information and content users may be annoyed by the wait and simply stop using Zune. And less Zune users means smaller communities that in the end, because of the difficulty to find other users, mean less Zune sales.