10 Minutes with a Zune Product Manager – What I Learned

Posted by Paul Colligan on Wednesday, January 10, 2007

Thanks to Cesar Menendez of ZuneInsider.com, I got about ten minutes with Matt Jubelirer, Zune Product Manager. An Edelman rep was in the room as well, of course.

Three interesting quotable take-homes from the meeting:

I asked point blank how they could support the “already #2” statement from Gate’s keynote. His reponse was that they are #2 in the 30 gig player space. He even offered a 9% marketshare (in that space). Two interesting thoughts: 1) Not that implausible 2) Creative and Archos are both in that space.

He said they are “on track” to their one million units by June goal. Obviously, the holliday season is the most important chunk of and sales year and if they’re still speaking of that goal, the holliday had to have been pretty good to them. Where did the sales come from? Don’t know, but I think they’re happening.

And of course, I asked about Podcasting and the Zune. Neither Matt nor the Edelman rep was surprised with my question. The response, “It is something we are working on.”

The goal this week was to meet some Zune people and get an idea of how “serious” Microsoft was about this project. One of the funny things about being a multi-gabillion dollar company is that you can throw millions at something and still not be serious.

I going to go with Microsoft is serious about Zune. They understand their position in the marketplace and although I think they’ve made some silly decisions, this is a real player to be dealt with.

And, when we have a legitimate Podcatching client from Microsoft (they are “working on it”), we’ll do more to double our audience than the iPhone or AppleTV possibly can.

Phase 2 begins when I get home.

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  • tf

    “And, when we have a legitimate Podcatching client from Microsoft (they are “working on it”), we’ll do more to double our audience than the iPhone or AppleTV possibly can.”

    Ha, ha, ha, ha!!!

    Are you serious? I mean to some extent it’s true because Apple adding podcast support to iTunes and a podcast directory already increased the market by several orders of magnitude… But come on… AppleTV enables video podcast viewing, something which is a natural (most podcasts video or otherwise or listened to/viewed on the PC). And the whole strategy expands the ecosystem, grows the userbase, and makes the market more palatable.

    Less than a million zunies jumping on the bandwagon 2 years later doesn’t change the market… AT ALL.

  • http://www.paulcolligan.com Paul Colligan

    Deadly serious.

    Remember, I’m an Apple fanboy as well. I’m typing this on a MacBook Pro.

    But I also have Parallels on this thing because most of the world runs Windows and I need to be able to run it with them.

    When Microsoft “turns on Podcasting,” however they turn on Podcasting, will increase our numbers. It’s not an issue of what is better than what, or coolness, or any of the other buzzwords.

    It is an issue of numbers.

    Paul

  • tf

    Um, Microsoft does not equal Zune…

    The hundreds of millions of Windows users aren’t downloading and using Zune software… So you are talking about at best a few hundred thousand users, many of whom already use podcasts.

  • http://www.paulcolligan.com Paul Colligan

    I would agree if it were just Zune software.

    But once you see it in Zune, you’ll see it in Windows Media – and vice versa.

    Paul

  • tf

    “But once you see it in Zune, you’ll see it in Windows Media – and vice versa.”

    Will we? They are two distinct teams. When the Zune team was formed they gutted tons of features from WMP and built up. The WMP team was fairly shocked to see what was put together.

    There is no reason to expect future development to be parallel as the existing products are not parallel.