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Comment by philistine | Hacker News Reader

Zune never took off because Apple unveiled iPhone soon after.

When all the news and talks are about this iPod killer from Microsoft and then Apple themselves release a truly groundbreaking iPod killer themselves, you look foolish. Zune really got done in by marketing.

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Definitely. But even if the iPhone were to be delayed there's no way Zune would have made a significant dent in iPod's market.

It was already the established player and the user base was already locked in with hundreds of $ in iTunes purchases. The usets weren't gonna throw that away no matter how much better Zune would have been.

iPod's market dominance wasn't in some UX magic that couldn't be replicated or braten by competitors, it was in the iTunes purchases that made it comfy to own specific songs and also locked users in.

I was sometimes involved in this project at MS. The music buying experience for Zune was awful, and I regret missed opportunities to be more forceful about telling the Windows Media execs that they were fucking up. Part of the problem was MS insistence on being fair to everyone and having an open system which led to 5000 shitty online stores where you could buy music. Instead of Apple that had exactly one where they owned and controlled the entire vertical.

This was the whole reason for creating Zune. Again, MS had licensed out their awful Windows Media products to 100 Chinese digital music player makers and got a fragmented market of trash, so MS jumped in to try and do it the right way themselves, but sadly too late.

I think the flat Metro UI evolved out of all the work we did coming out of the Windows Media division. I based all the flat design work I was doing for MS on British Sky TV's set top box graphics, simply because they were easiest for my developer brain to code and they also worked really well:

https://youtu.be/-26xPkRXtsU

What you’re describing is enlightening, thank you for sharing. The music purchasing workflow involved collaboration with the marketing people at Apple, which explains their successes.

What's funny is that Microsoft and its partners did all the groundwork to open up the labels and gave Apple an easy ride. I was working with Peter Gabriel and he could call any record label in the world and get us a meeting to show the demos. The startup I was working for would go in and it would spend a lot of energy proving to the labels that digital was the endgame and CDs were eventually going to die. This was a very hard job.

And then a couple of weeks after each demo we'd get a call from the labels and they would tip us off that Apple had come to show them something special that they were working on, and of course that meeting went a lot easier than ours...

(also every record label on Earth was using Macs not PCs, so Microsoft's software either had to be run on a laptop we took, or we had to show them Microsoft's absolutely awful Mac software. PG, bless him, gave me his personal iBook for testing (complete with all his passwords and AOL account), which he probably got from Jobs, but I was in a belligerent anti-Mac era so I shoved it in a closet with the button nailed down and stuck it on that "hold the button" game for two years)

We chose a strict flat metro style on Microsoft Band because it was super easy to render with the tiny CPU we had! All squares and monochrome icons meant we could render at an absurd FPS.

Wait, 5000 is an actual number?

> locked in with hundreds of $ in iTunes purchases

Wasn't one of the big selling points that songs bought on iTunes were DRM-free?

(Sorry, I went to search and you are right: Apple went DRM-free only on 2009)

No. I was involved a lot in these early rights meetings and the labels were adamant that the tracks had to have DRM. All the early demos that got the labels on board had DRM, but all the consumers hated it, everyone at the labels actually hated it too, but I suspect their legal teams were forcing the issue. It took a big personality like Jobs, with a market-leading product to finally kill it.

p.s. haven't Apple been sneaking DRM back onto their music lately? I know all the videos are DRM, right?

The world was also not ready for music subscriptions. That was the really compelling benefit of Zune for me, that we take for granted today with Spotify et al. The vast majority of people I knew, even early adopter types, just could not wrap their head around the idea. “What happens when you stop paying? You’re left with NOTHING!”

100%. These were the arguments we had with Microsoft, Nokia etc. We tested subscriptions a lot in 2000-2004, but you have to remember, this was DOWNLOAD subscriptions. So what would happen is, if you failed to pay you ended up with a player or hard drive filled with thousands of "MP3" files that you could no longer play because the DRM license had expired. The customers were livid as fuck about this scenario.

My argument was to have all-you-can-eat streaming subscriptions, but it was shot down, and at the time mobile data was pretty shitty (I built the original streaming service on a 9600bps GSM modem in 1999) so you could only stream at home.

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