8 ms·

Reading Infinite Games, they tell an anecdote about a Microsoft exec on a flight telling an Apple exec that the Zune was a way better portable music player than

by derwiki 22d ago

Reading Infinite Games, they tell an anecdote about a Microsoft exec on a flight telling an Apple exec that the Zune was a way better portable music player than the iPod. The Apple exec was just “yup, you’re probably right” and then soon after the iPhone dropped

mikestew 22d ago
Might want to edit, as this would make sense/be amusing if the exec in the last sentence was Apple. That, or I can’t read.
- derwiki 22d ago
  You got it, thank you!
troupo 22d ago
Zune was probably a better player. It was too late, and arrived when MS didn't much care. There are emails unearthed in various lawsuits where you can read Bill Gates screaming at his subordinates: "why the hell can't our partners like Sony and Creative create a similar device? Give them all, give them early access to everything, work with them". In the end MS felt compelled to make their own.
- bayindirh 22d ago
  Sony can't be bothered to compete with Apple in that era. They were trying to recover from their DRM dreams, and their devices were already sounding great with in-house software and hardware. Creative's Muvo^2 already was the poor man's iPod with surprisingly good audio quality as well.
  - cptskippy 22d ago
    I feel like this completely misses the mark. Audio quality was never the compelling feature of the iPod and people weren't clamoring for it because it sounded good. When the iPod came out you largely had two options for carrying your music collection on the go. You either carried a binder of CDs, or you had some niche player like Mini-Disc or an MP3 player. Both alternatives were expensive and had limitations similar to a CD in terms of number of tracks you could carry. I had an MP3 player on either side of 2000 that was slightly smaller than a deck of playing cards that could use Smart Media flash memory cards. The largest card at the time was either 16 or 32mb and was enough to hold 1 album at near CD quality. Creative's Muvo was a weird form factor that was larger than an iPod. It had a horrid interface both on device and for loading music. It's only grace was that it was slightly cheaper than an iPod and didn't need a Mac with FireWire. Although iircc this was pre USB 2.0 so not having FireWire would mean loading music took forever and a day. The iPod allowed you to carry most, if not all, of your music collection in a package slightly larger than a deck of playing cards. And it had a fantastic interface for navigating music on the device. This was at a time before most people had laptops and if you had a PC it was at home and used sparingly. The iPod was such a compelling mobile computing device that it drove adoption of the iMac. Apple would eventually release iTunes for Windows and USB support but that was many years later.
    - thewebguyd 22d ago
      > I had an MP3 player on either side of 2000 that was slightly smaller than a deck of playing cards that could use Smart Media flash memory cards. The largest card at the time was either 16 or 32mb and was enough to hold 1 album at near CD quality. I had something similar. The storage was the iPod's killer feature, along with iTune's $0.99 songs. Suddenly you no longer had to buy whole albums, and you didn't have to swap out what was on your MP3 player every day when you wanted a different playlist. A 5GB hard drive in your pocket was a huge innovation then.
      - fckgw 22d ago
        "1000 songs in your pocket" was the entire driving force behind the thing. It was constantly bellowed in the marketing and it's what Steve Jobs demanded of the engineering team from day one. The size and the storage were paramount and they knew no one else could match it.
    - jonhohle 22d ago
      I had a Rio Volt which somewhat bridged the gap. 700MB mp3 CD/RWs (about 10 hours of music per disc) and a CD player when traveling and picking up new music. Not as small as an iPod, but no book of CDs was necessary, either.
    - peezd 22d ago
      Yep this was really it. The amount of storage on the ipod was amazing and just opened up the idea that "yes you put your full music collection on it".
    - troupo 22d ago
      > I feel like this completely misses the mark. Audio quality was never the compelling feature of the iPod and people weren't clamoring for it because it sounded good. Indeed. Apple made (and showed) the actual reasoning in the iPod introduction. All competitors had to was do the same: https://youtu.be/bz1ZWvZBGYM?is=NFlmkhq1gWfcNVgv https://youtu.be/bz1ZWvZBGYM?is=NFlmkhq1gWfcNVgv - 1000 songs - play all popular formats: mp3, wav, aiff - Firewire for fast transfers. Download 1000 songs at 30x speed than USB - 10 hours continuous playback on single rechargeable battery - the size of a card deck Not like it was magical unknown hardware components at the time. And the competition still couldn't do it for almost a decade
- cosmic_cheese 22d ago
  > Zune was probably a better player. In some ways, anyway. Never owned a Zune myself, but a university classmate did and I was shocked by how poorly it handled non-Latin languages… she had a ton of Japanese and Korean songs loaded onto it, and their metadata all displayed as "missing character" blocks. She used it a lot like one might use an iPod Shuffle despite it having a nice screen because the only way to tell what was playing was by hearing it play. By contrast my 4th gen B&W iPod which was about 5-6 years older handled unicode just fine.
  - VCFundedGenYer 22d ago
    IIRC the Zune had a much better DAC on the device than any ipod. I own two of them and the sound quality was always notably great.
- unsupp0rted 22d ago
  It let you squirt over a song to your friend https://youtu.be/ud6rwVkbovA https://youtu.be/ud6rwVkbovA And they could listen to it 3 times in 3 days
  - ralfd 22d ago
    “Squirting” was ridiculed at the time and the word itself scaring away women. Jobs killed it then in an interview with a classic quote: Microsoft = Cold tech and Apple = Humanity. MS scares her away, Apple gets the girl. > QUESTION: Microsoft has announced its new iPod competitor, Zune. It says that this device is all about building communities. Are you worried? > Steve Jobs: In a word, no. I’ve seen the demonstrations on the Internet about how you can find another person using a Zune and give them a song they can play three times. It takes forever. By the time you’ve gone through all that, the girl’s got up and left! You’re much better off to take one of your earbuds out and put it in her ear. Then you’re connected with about two feet of headphone cable.
- lotsofpulp 22d ago
  Because why would Sony go out on a limb and take all that risk for tiny hardware margins just so Microsoft could grab the lion’s share of margins with software licensing fees?
nxobject 22d ago
Hell hath no fury like Apple Global Security scorned...
VCFundedGenYer 22d ago
To be fair, the Zune actually was a better media player than the ipod in almost every way. That wasn't a false statement. The issue was the abysmal marketing and "me too" attitude Microsoft had (and still has).
- wat10000 22d ago
  It was better in every way you can quantify in a tech specs listing, and not in any way that actually matters to the customer.
  - deleted 22d ago
    [deleted]
  - deleted 22d ago
    [deleted]
  - stillpointlab 22d ago
    100% - the iPod wasn't just good enough, it was more than enough for almost everyone. The Zune was firmly in the diminishing returns category by the time it came out.
    - compiler-guy 22d ago
      Yep. To overcome an incumbent that sells a very good product and has momentum, it is almost never enough to be somewhat better. You have to be "knock my socks off" better. The Zune may have been somewhat better (until the nano and iphone), but it wasn't enough better to overcome the ecosystem switching costs.
  - georgel 22d ago
    I had the OG white Zune. It was the same price as an iPod ~$250. The reason I chose Zune was the Zune Pass. A precursor to Spotify. Plus growing up in the Seattle area, I knew other people who had them and we would trade songs.
    - 22d ago
bingo-bongo 22d ago
Simon Sinek - Apple vs Microsoft: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=jEOftmUJ6a4 https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=jEOftmUJ6a4 But it had nothing to do with the iPod/iPhone release in his story. (story starts ~1:15, but I highly recommend the entire talk)
mark_l_watson 22d ago
I loved the book The Infinite Game. Really changed how I looked at work, personal research, and being an author. Recommended!
shuwix 22d ago
Actually, Microsoft came with "modern" smart phone much sooner. Actually too soon, technology wasn't there (price, computing power, size, weight, battery life). Apple never came first ... but often just at the right moment and had marketing skills to make it a new trend.
- __alexs 22d ago
  Windows CE (1996) was garbage compared to Palm OS (also 1996.)
- NoMoreNicksLeft 22d ago
  >Apple never came first ... but often just at the right moment and had marketing skills to make it a new trend. Newton.
  - simondotau 22d ago
    Fun fact: the Newton was the first mobile device to use an ARM CPU.
- skrebbel 22d ago
  I'm the opposite of an Apple fanboy (typing this on a Windows box), but this is some grade A nonsense. Sure, MS launched PDAs and phone-ish devices long ago, running Windows CE and whatnot but they were awful. It's absolute bollocks that the iPhone was a splashing success because of Apple marketing. It was a splashing success because it worked spectacularly well. Random non-tech people would randomly pull out their newest purchase to show their friends. "And now it's a notepad!" "Look and now suddenly it's a calculator!" Sure, your awful HP Tablet had all that, and a call function, well before. But it sucked. It felt like using a computer while squinting, and not like a magic calculator that can turn into a notepad and then into a phone and then into an iPod. The iPhone was a success because it worked so well. And it worked so well because the technology was there - in part because they invented it and in part because they had the taste to not bring out a shit product but wait a bit instead.
  - 22d ago
kccqzy 22d ago
That just sounds like a standard introvert response when one doesn’t want to walk.
adventured 22d ago
The anecdote is likely a false rip of the actual story: [2017] Speaking at an event Tuesday, Scott Forstall, who lead Apple's iOS software division under Jobs, recounted the surprising history behind the company's first touchscreen prototype, which ultimately lead to the first iPhone. It all began, Forstall said, because Jobs had an acquaintance at Microsoft who he really, really, didn't like. "It began because Steve hated this guy at Microsoft," Forstall said during the event. "Any time Steve had any interaction with the guy, he'd come back pissed off." The unnamed Microsoft exec, who was apparently the husband of a friend of Jobs' wife, apparently bragged so much it pushed Jobs over the edge. "He just shoved it in Steve's face -- the way they were going to rule the world with their new tablets with their pens. He came in on Monday with a set of expletives and then was like 'let's show them how it's really done.' " https://mashable.com/article/scott-forstall-steve-jobs-microsoft-grudge https://mashable.com/article/scott-forstall-steve-jobs-micro...
- meowface 22d ago
  Spite cam actually be one of the most powerful motivators for productivity, in my own experience. I can buy this story being accurate.
  - astrange 22d ago
    In Steve's case "fueled by spite" would be more precisely "borderline personality disorder". If you read him in that lens it might help distinguish how to be successful like him without all of the bad parts.
ziofill 22d ago
IMHO the iPod nano (the little puck with a touchscreen that you could clip on stuff) was the best player I ever had.

by derwiki 22d ago

mikestew 22d ago

Might want to edit, as this would make sense/be amusing if the exec in the last sentence was Apple. That, or I can’t read.

derwiki 22d ago
You got it, thank you!

troupo 22d ago

Zune was probably a better player. It was too late, and arrived when MS didn't much care. There are emails unearthed in various lawsuits where you can read Bill Gates screaming at his subordinates: "why the hell can't our partners like Sony and Creative create a similar device? Give them all, give them early access to everything, work with them". In the end MS felt compelled to make their own.

bayindirh 22d ago
Sony can't be bothered to compete with Apple in that era. They were trying to recover from their DRM dreams, and their devices were already sounding great with in-house software and hardware. Creative's Muvo^2 already was the poor man's iPod with surprisingly good audio quality as well.
- cptskippy 22d ago
  I feel like this completely misses the mark. Audio quality was never the compelling feature of the iPod and people weren't clamoring for it because it sounded good. When the iPod came out you largely had two options for carrying your music collection on the go. You either carried a binder of CDs, or you had some niche player like Mini-Disc or an MP3 player. Both alternatives were expensive and had limitations similar to a CD in terms of number of tracks you could carry. I had an MP3 player on either side of 2000 that was slightly smaller than a deck of playing cards that could use Smart Media flash memory cards. The largest card at the time was either 16 or 32mb and was enough to hold 1 album at near CD quality. Creative's Muvo was a weird form factor that was larger than an iPod. It had a horrid interface both on device and for loading music. It's only grace was that it was slightly cheaper than an iPod and didn't need a Mac with FireWire. Although iircc this was pre USB 2.0 so not having FireWire would mean loading music took forever and a day. The iPod allowed you to carry most, if not all, of your music collection in a package slightly larger than a deck of playing cards. And it had a fantastic interface for navigating music on the device. This was at a time before most people had laptops and if you had a PC it was at home and used sparingly. The iPod was such a compelling mobile computing device that it drove adoption of the iMac. Apple would eventually release iTunes for Windows and USB support but that was many years later.
  - thewebguyd 22d ago
    > I had an MP3 player on either side of 2000 that was slightly smaller than a deck of playing cards that could use Smart Media flash memory cards. The largest card at the time was either 16 or 32mb and was enough to hold 1 album at near CD quality. I had something similar. The storage was the iPod's killer feature, along with iTune's $0.99 songs. Suddenly you no longer had to buy whole albums, and you didn't have to swap out what was on your MP3 player every day when you wanted a different playlist. A 5GB hard drive in your pocket was a huge innovation then.
    - fckgw 22d ago
      "1000 songs in your pocket" was the entire driving force behind the thing. It was constantly bellowed in the marketing and it's what Steve Jobs demanded of the engineering team from day one. The size and the storage were paramount and they knew no one else could match it.
  - jonhohle 22d ago
    I had a Rio Volt which somewhat bridged the gap. 700MB mp3 CD/RWs (about 10 hours of music per disc) and a CD player when traveling and picking up new music. Not as small as an iPod, but no book of CDs was necessary, either.
  - peezd 22d ago
    Yep this was really it. The amount of storage on the ipod was amazing and just opened up the idea that "yes you put your full music collection on it".
  - troupo 22d ago
    > I feel like this completely misses the mark. Audio quality was never the compelling feature of the iPod and people weren't clamoring for it because it sounded good. Indeed. Apple made (and showed) the actual reasoning in the iPod introduction. All competitors had to was do the same: https://youtu.be/bz1ZWvZBGYM?is=NFlmkhq1gWfcNVgv https://youtu.be/bz1ZWvZBGYM?is=NFlmkhq1gWfcNVgv - 1000 songs - play all popular formats: mp3, wav, aiff - Firewire for fast transfers. Download 1000 songs at 30x speed than USB - 10 hours continuous playback on single rechargeable battery - the size of a card deck Not like it was magical unknown hardware components at the time. And the competition still couldn't do it for almost a decade
cosmic_cheese 22d ago
> Zune was probably a better player. In some ways, anyway. Never owned a Zune myself, but a university classmate did and I was shocked by how poorly it handled non-Latin languages… she had a ton of Japanese and Korean songs loaded onto it, and their metadata all displayed as "missing character" blocks. She used it a lot like one might use an iPod Shuffle despite it having a nice screen because the only way to tell what was playing was by hearing it play. By contrast my 4th gen B&W iPod which was about 5-6 years older handled unicode just fine.
- VCFundedGenYer 22d ago
  IIRC the Zune had a much better DAC on the device than any ipod. I own two of them and the sound quality was always notably great.
unsupp0rted 22d ago
It let you squirt over a song to your friend https://youtu.be/ud6rwVkbovA https://youtu.be/ud6rwVkbovA And they could listen to it 3 times in 3 days
- ralfd 22d ago
  “Squirting” was ridiculed at the time and the word itself scaring away women. Jobs killed it then in an interview with a classic quote: Microsoft = Cold tech and Apple = Humanity. MS scares her away, Apple gets the girl. > QUESTION: Microsoft has announced its new iPod competitor, Zune. It says that this device is all about building communities. Are you worried? > Steve Jobs: In a word, no. I’ve seen the demonstrations on the Internet about how you can find another person using a Zune and give them a song they can play three times. It takes forever. By the time you’ve gone through all that, the girl’s got up and left! You’re much better off to take one of your earbuds out and put it in her ear. Then you’re connected with about two feet of headphone cable.
lotsofpulp 22d ago
Because why would Sony go out on a limb and take all that risk for tiny hardware margins just so Microsoft could grab the lion’s share of margins with software licensing fees?

nxobject 22d ago

Hell hath no fury like Apple Global Security scorned...

VCFundedGenYer 22d ago

To be fair, the Zune actually was a better media player than the ipod in almost every way. That wasn't a false statement. The issue was the abysmal marketing and "me too" attitude Microsoft had (and still has).

wat10000 22d ago
It was better in every way you can quantify in a tech specs listing, and not in any way that actually matters to the customer.
- deleted 22d ago
  [deleted]
- deleted 22d ago
  [deleted]
- stillpointlab 22d ago
  100% - the iPod wasn't just good enough, it was more than enough for almost everyone. The Zune was firmly in the diminishing returns category by the time it came out.
  - compiler-guy 22d ago
    Yep. To overcome an incumbent that sells a very good product and has momentum, it is almost never enough to be somewhat better. You have to be "knock my socks off" better. The Zune may have been somewhat better (until the nano and iphone), but it wasn't enough better to overcome the ecosystem switching costs.
- georgel 22d ago
  I had the OG white Zune. It was the same price as an iPod ~$250. The reason I chose Zune was the Zune Pass. A precursor to Spotify. Plus growing up in the Seattle area, I knew other people who had them and we would trade songs.
  - 22d ago

bingo-bongo 22d ago

Simon Sinek - Apple vs Microsoft: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=jEOftmUJ6a4 https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=jEOftmUJ6a4 But it had nothing to do with the iPod/iPhone release in his story. (story starts ~1:15, but I highly recommend the entire talk)

mark_l_watson 22d ago

I loved the book The Infinite Game. Really changed how I looked at work, personal research, and being an author. Recommended!

shuwix 22d ago

Actually, Microsoft came with "modern" smart phone much sooner. Actually too soon, technology wasn't there (price, computing power, size, weight, battery life). Apple never came first ... but often just at the right moment and had marketing skills to make it a new trend.

__alexs 22d ago
Windows CE (1996) was garbage compared to Palm OS (also 1996.)
NoMoreNicksLeft 22d ago
>Apple never came first ... but often just at the right moment and had marketing skills to make it a new trend. Newton.
- simondotau 22d ago
  Fun fact: the Newton was the first mobile device to use an ARM CPU.
skrebbel 22d ago
I'm the opposite of an Apple fanboy (typing this on a Windows box), but this is some grade A nonsense. Sure, MS launched PDAs and phone-ish devices long ago, running Windows CE and whatnot but they were awful. It's absolute bollocks that the iPhone was a splashing success because of Apple marketing. It was a splashing success because it worked spectacularly well. Random non-tech people would randomly pull out their newest purchase to show their friends. "And now it's a notepad!" "Look and now suddenly it's a calculator!" Sure, your awful HP Tablet had all that, and a call function, well before. But it sucked. It felt like using a computer while squinting, and not like a magic calculator that can turn into a notepad and then into a phone and then into an iPod. The iPhone was a success because it worked so well. And it worked so well because the technology was there - in part because they invented it and in part because they had the taste to not bring out a shit product but wait a bit instead.
- 22d ago

kccqzy 22d ago

That just sounds like a standard introvert response when one doesn’t want to walk.

adventured 22d ago

The anecdote is likely a false rip of the actual story: [2017] Speaking at an event Tuesday, Scott Forstall, who lead Apple's iOS software division under Jobs, recounted the surprising history behind the company's first touchscreen prototype, which ultimately lead to the first iPhone. It all began, Forstall said, because Jobs had an acquaintance at Microsoft who he really, really, didn't like. "It began because Steve hated this guy at Microsoft," Forstall said during the event. "Any time Steve had any interaction with the guy, he'd come back pissed off." The unnamed Microsoft exec, who was apparently the husband of a friend of Jobs' wife, apparently bragged so much it pushed Jobs over the edge. "He just shoved it in Steve's face -- the way they were going to rule the world with their new tablets with their pens. He came in on Monday with a set of expletives and then was like 'let's show them how it's really done.' " https://mashable.com/article/scott-forstall-steve-jobs-microsoft-grudge https://mashable.com/article/scott-forstall-steve-jobs-micro...

meowface 22d ago
Spite cam actually be one of the most powerful motivators for productivity, in my own experience. I can buy this story being accurate.
- astrange 22d ago
  In Steve's case "fueled by spite" would be more precisely "borderline personality disorder". If you read him in that lens it might help distinguish how to be successful like him without all of the bad parts.

ziofill 22d ago

IMHO the iPod nano (the little puck with a touchscreen that you could clip on stuff) was the best player I ever had.