For many years, Microsoft has tried to compete in all possible fields, and it is true that it has managed to become one of the most important companies in the technological field because it is the brand that has developed one of the most used operating systems in practically the entire world. But it has also made big mistakes, such as trying to compete in fields in which there was a brand that completely dominated the market, and there was one in particular in which it had no chance, when it launched Zune to compete against iPod.
Audio players were one of the most important advances in the field of music, and they managed to enable an entire generation to enjoy their favorite songs anywhere, something that with the arrival of streaming services would become one of the most basic aspects of a mobile phone. In the early 2000s, Apple launched the first model of digital audio player that did not need a CD to work, but rather used a hard drive to store the songs, increasing its portability.
This was Zune, the Microsoft device that sought to compete against Apple’s iPod
As we can imagine, one of the biggest problems that Microsoft had when facing Apple was the difference between generations that existed in the models that were launched of its devices. It is not the first time that we see one of the two companies trying to get a share of users from the other by launching a product similar to the one the other brand had, but this is something that obviously does not usually work when one of the two brands already have a majority audience.
In the case of Apple, iPod was a big change as we can imagine, since it was one of the devices that implemented the digital era in the early 2000s, completely changing the way many people listened to music, and becoming thus becoming a benchmark in the industry. The creation of the iPod would mark the arrival of MP3 players that used internal memory instead of a disk or cassette, something that Microsoft could obviously take advantage of if it created one that surpassed Apple’s.
But it is clear that it was not like that, and the biggest problem that the company faced is how late it was to launch its first player of this type, mainly due to the fact that Zunethe player Microsoft It arrived five years after the appearance of the iPod. Even so, during the period from 2006 to the end of 2007 they had a series of sales that did not result in losses, but starting in 2008 they learned that it was impossible to compete against Apple, not for the iPod, but for another very different device, the iPhone.
The arrival of the iPhone to the market, and in general of smartphones as we currently know them, greatly conditioned the sales of both Zune as of iPod, with the big difference that while Apple made profits from the various versions of the iPod they continued to release, Microsoft stopped manufacturing the Zune in 2009 because they were not good business.
To this we must add the countless failures that Microsoft has had over the years with its software, and the Windows Phone was not the company’s biggest catastrophe in the segment of devices of this type, but rather the Zune was the first to have one of the biggest problems related to the device firmware. 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 the “Z2K9«.
