For many years, Microsoft has tried to be competitive in all possible areas, and it is true that it has managed to become one of the most important companies in the technological field since it is the brand that has developed one of the systems of The most widely used operating systems almost all over the world. But it also made big mistakes, like trying to compete in areas where there was one brand that completely dominated the market, and there was one in particular where it had no chance, when she started. Zune compete with iPod.
Audio players have been one of the most important advances in the field of music, and they have managed to allow a whole generation to enjoy their favorite songs anywhere, which with the arrival of services streaming, would become one of the most fundamental aspects of a mobile phone. . In the early 2000s, Apple released the first digital audio player model that did not need a CD to operate, but instead used a hard drive to store songs, increasing its portability.
It was the Zune, the Microsoft device that sought to compete with Apple’s iPod
As we can imagine, one of the biggest problems that Microsoft faced against Apple was the difference between generations that existed in the launched models of its devices. This isn’t the first time we’ve seen one of the two companies try to get a share of users from the other by launching a product similar to that of the other brand, but it’s something something that obviously doesn’t usually work when one of the two companies (both brands) already has a majority audience.
In the case of Apple, the iPod represented a great change as one can imagine, since it was one of the devices that implemented the digital age in the early 2000s, completely changing the way many people listened to music, thus becoming a reference in the digital field. the industry. The creation of the iPod would mark the arrival of MP3 players using internal memory instead of a disk or cassette, which Microsoft could obviously benefit from if it created one that surpassed Apple’s.
But it is clear that this was not the case, and the biggest problem the company faced was the delay in launching its first such player, mainly due to the fact that Zunethe player Microsoft It arrived five years after the appearance of the iPod. Even so, between 2006 and the end of 2007 they made a series of sales that did not result in losses, but from 2008 they learned that it was impossible to compete with Apple, not for the iPod , but for another very different device, the iPhone.
The arrival of the iPhone on the market, and in general of smartphones as we currently know them, has greatly influenced the sales of both Zune from iPod, with the big difference that while Apple made a profit with the various versions of the iPod that they continued to release, Microsoft stopped making the Zune in 2009 because it wasn’t a good deal.
To this must be added the countless failures that Microsoft has experienced over the years with its software, and Windows Phone was not the company’s biggest disaster in the segment of devices of this type, but rather the Zune was the first to have one of the biggest device firmware issues. In 2008, with the arrival of a leap year, these devices stopped working due to an extremely large programming error that would expose the company’s product, an event known as “Z2K9“.
