Thanks, Stevie — But What Am I Going to Do With 1 Million Zunes? I Hope You Saved the Receipt …
My 85-year-old uncle probably will never own an iPod, and I hope we’ll get him to own a Zune.”
Bach told the San Francisco Chronicle. “We’re very pleased with the progress. We’ve sold a little over a million Zunes. In the category we’re in, the hard-disk-based category, we’ve got about 10% market share. It’s a good start. It’s not an overwhelming start. I’m not going to pretend it’s some gigantic move. … There will be new things down the path (in the fall). We just came out with a special edition pink Zune and a watermelon-colored Zune, which are the personal favorites with my kids.”
I guess the “National Park-bench brown” Zune was a nonstarter in the Bach household. Anyway … Selling 1 million of any product in nine months is certainly an accomplishment–especially when that product competes with a market leader like the iPod. That said, with Apple recently celebrating the sale of its 100 millionth iPod, Bach’s got his work cut out for him.
UPDATE: Looks like Microsoft may not have yet hit that 1-million-Zunes-sold mark. Business 2.0 points out that Bach didn’t really say Microsoft had already sold a million Zunes. “If you listen to the interview,” Philip Elmer-DeWitt writes, “what Bach said was:
When we finish our fiscal year in June we’ll have sold a little over a million Zunes, so we feel very good about that.” [emphasis added]
“That’s what we used to call an editing error,” Elmer-DeWitt continues, “one that mistakes a projection with actual sales and expands the time frame by about 15%. Microsoft still has more than a month to sell its first million Zunes, which would put it on the schedule it set for itself, not ahead.”
