Microsoft has just announced a disastrous December quarter, but few words have been said about its music player, Zune. This decreased $100 million, or 54 percent, reflecting a decrease in device sales. By contrast, Apple’s iPod unit sales were up 3 percent, while revenue dropped by 16 percent. However, this still brought $3.3 billion in revenue, as compared to $100 million for the Zune.

 

Due to competitive and broader economic pressures, Microsoft decided to drop the price of its flash-based Zune devices, and that meant that revenue was somewhat lower than Microsoft had projected. However, there are still plenty of voices suggesting that Microsoft should exit the Zune hardware business entirely as soon as possible.

 

Zune is the product-line brand name for the Zune portable media players, Zune software, and Zune Marketplace services sold by Microsoft, which provide online music, video, and podcast downloads.  Zune's primary competitor is the Apple iTunes/iPod product line. Zune players come in two variants, one hard-drive based and the other flash-memory based. Both play music, videos, podcasts, display images, and receive (but not record) FM radio. They can share files wirelessly with other Zunes and via USB with Xbox 360s and Windows PCs. Any Zune can also be synched wirelessly with a Windows PC.

 

Zune software allows users to manage files on the player, rip audio CDs, manage music, and buy songs, music videos, and TV shows at the Zune Marketplace online store using Microsoft Points or a Zune Pass which allows the subscriber to download unlimited songs temporarily and permanently keep ten favorite songs each month.

 

For years, Zune has been far behind the iPod, and incidents such as the Zune bug on New Year’s Eve that resulted from the inability of the device clock to handle the extra day in a leap year that was 2008 hasn’t endeared it to customers, even if Microsoft finally managed to solve the problem.