the Zunebox
on building the foundations of the social
Last Revised: 21 Dec 2006
Created: 13 Dec 2006
Okay, this is pretty funny. To respond to a few comments and emails: no, this isn't a Microsoft astroturf site. And come on now, folks — no matter how inept the Zune launch has made MS marketing appear, they could certainly come up with some astroturfing that has a more positive spin than this.
More Social Please
If the Zune can't find the social, bring the social to the Zune
I will first say that I hope that this text describes a thought process and resulting product long since planned and already well on its way to production, but I have no great confidence that this is the case. I will also note that I don't currently own a Zune, nor do I have plans to purchase one in the immediate future; I have no particular interest in the Zune's success or failure, beyond an abstract desire to have as many companies as possible competing to create interesting new toys for me to play with. This document is not intended to bury the Zune, nor to praise it. It is simply some notes regarding the weakness I see in the Zune's welcome to the social launch campaign, and a possible approach to recovering some lost ground and momentum.
defining the social
The social — the clear focus of the Zune's launch campaign — is not the device's wifi file sharing capability. The social is people actually using that wifi capability to exchange music, pictures, or something else that they enjoy, and this distinction is the fundamental weakness of the Zune's launch campaign.
Having a genuinely unique selling point is a great thing, and the Zune's wifi capability is a good feature to compete on, but it comes with some simple, inescapable logic: in order to wirelessly share music...squirt, if you must...there must be two Zunes involved. If 1,000,000 Zunes are sold in the United States, that's one Zune adrift in a sea of 299 non-Zune owners. Even if all those Zunes are sold within the likely target demographic, a young, hip Zune user will likely have only a single companion in a room of 100 people.
The situation is further complicated because the Zunes aren't connecting to a fixed network, but rather they can opportunistically build very temporary, ad hoc networks. Thus it's not just the number of Zunes sold that matters, but where they happen to be at any given point in time, whether they're turned on, and whether the users have wifi enabled. Regardless of the number of Zunes in New York City, a New Yorker who consistently sees No nearby Zune devices found, or nearby devices have wireless turned off will almost inevitably come to believe that "the social" is a mean-spirited joke at their (literal) expense.
where do you want to go today?
So does this mean that Microsoft should be re-focusing, that "the social" should be written off as an unfortunate, high profile error in strategy? No. For a wide variety of reasons, no.
From the glass-half-empty perspective, none of the Zune's other features offer very much to work with. There's been a tentative marketing push on the (relatively) large screen size, but it's not at all clear that enough people care about the video end of personal media devices for that to be a solid bet at this point. With TSL (Time Spent Listening) for the Zune's target market in a decade-long downward slide, the FM tuner is an even shakier proposition. Beyond that, there just isn't much to make the Zune stand out from the crowd.
From the glass-half-full perspective, however, the Zune's wifi capability is an extremely compelling feature, and a "social" media device that lets its users turn chance meetings and happy circumstance into new music, pictures, and video could be the right offer to make to a growing number of people. As another company pointed out when introducing a personal media device, "life is random" — and the Zune has the potential to embrace that spirit in a way that no other device can rival. Yet.
The failure wasn't in the device itself or the sharing functionality (since I don't believe that the DRM and sharing restrictions will be negotiable for some time to come, nor do I believe that's a productive direction to consider right now). The failure was in not going into the Zune's launch with a single question at the forefront: "can we ensure that 'the social' isn't just a slogan, but something that everyone who buys a Zune actually experiences within a day of opening that box?"
The Zune can do something really cool.
Why have so few people had the opportunity to take advantage of that?
building the Zunebox
Right now the responsibility for the social essentially lies with the user. The Zune can beam your beats right now, so if you're not finding the social it's your own fault. You live in the wrong place. You hang out in the wrong places. You have the wrong friends, or just don't have enough friends.
Change that. Don't project the product uptake curve and sales distribution patterns to establish anticipated sharing volume over time based on an assumed critical mass user density. Build a Zunebox.
The Zunebox sits in Virgin Music stores, Borders Music, Starbucks, and Best Buy locations, waiting to share music with any Zune that comes near. The Zunebox can offer up the specific music that the location wants to spread: the "Santa Baby" collection for Christmas at Starbucks, or pre-release tracks from the new Bloc Party or Gang Starr albums at Virgin. The Zunebox gives people a reason to buy the Zune — the Zune and not any of the other alternatives out there — because the Zune-to-Zune version of the social is going to take time to develop and people need to experience the social now.
It's not quite as simple as all that, of course. The Zunebox would come with a laundry list of technological, logistical, and business headaches...but it could work.
After all, is the problem really that "welcome to the social" hasn't touched 18-28 year olds frequently enough? Or, perhaps, is there something else that needs to happen here?
a closing note for Microsoft's Zune group
You don't have to build the Zunebox, and I'm honestly not certain that it would make a difference now, but do something to make the social a reality. Do something to give Zune users as many opportunities as possible to think "damn, this is cool" as they pull another song from out of the aether. Do something to keep Zune users from looking for the social, only to find: No nearby Zune devices found, or nearby devices have wireless turned off.
The image chairs, records used for the spash page and proposal page header was created by Nagyman and is used under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 license.
The Zunebox proposal has its roots in the seamonkeyrodeo blog post Zune: welcome to the gamble, though many others have also noted the weakness of the social as it is currently formulated.
A version of the more social please splash page image that doesn't meta-refresh you away is available here.