Less is more, and more is less, more or less. Advertisers who are cheap are also short-sighted. If they buy a magazine ad, they want to fill every last bit of it with something. You know how some magazines sell smaller sizes of ad space in the back of their magazines? The logic is that by saying more, the consumer will understand more, be more affected, and be more likely to buy something.
But the logic falls apart in practice because what really happens is that a reader will ignore the ad entirely. They also subconsciously recognize bad design and will feel the ad is not from a reputable source. But when Apple runs an ad and the entire page is blank except for an iPod that is well designed, it creates desire, and desire drives sales. Cheap advertisers cram lots of information into a limited space.
Smart advertisers create focus by removing distractions and driving a key point home. The power of design. Good design is a component of competitive advantage often overlooked by those who were educated to be accountants, salespeople, and even marketers themselves.
But since when do designers become CEOs of companies? BMW gets it. Many things that are quite difficult look easy after the fact, like sailing to the American continent in I mean, the continent is huge, who could miss it? Josh Steimle.
This was too good to pass up, however, because it leads into a good conversation on a number of topics, including: 1. Introduced in when the iPod and the ITunes store was rocketing in sales and popularity, PlaysforSure failed to help device makers like Creative, Sony, and Dell to stop the iPod onslaught. In this case, the traditional Microsoft platform horizontal strategy did not work, despite being earlier to market than Apple.
The company announced its direct answer to the iPod, the Zune, in October of By this time, Apple had sold over 80 million iPods and 1. In a move that further doomed PlaysforSure, the Zune was not compatible with PlaysforSure content and the new Zune content store was not compatible with PlaysforSure hardware and software players.
While the Zune itself did not get bad reviews per se, it was seen as not bringing anything radically new to the party. It did have one innovative feature, built-in WiFi, which was not yet prevalent on the media players of the time, including the iPod. It was used originally for the social features of Zune, where you could see what nearby Zune owners were listening to and you could share songs with them — with certain limitations.
The feature suffered from not enough people buying Zunes to share with, and later updates the Wi-Fi capability was put to better use for wireless syncing and access to the ZunePass subscription. By mid , the Zune had sold about 3. In the fall of , Microsoft launched the Zune HD to positive reviews. But at that point it was a case of too little, too late. The iPod Touch dominated the media player space, which was now starting to decline as the iPhone was ramping up.
While there was and is still a market for for a standalone media player, Microsoft was competing with an entrenched ecosystem in iTunes and the IOS App store.
The Zune HD was a good media player and its ZunePass subscription a very viable content offering — but both put together did not offer anything that significantly move the needle against the iPod. In , Microsoft announced that it was discontinuing the Zune hardware line. The Zune was a failure, and many have put it on the dubious list of worst failed product launches along with New Coke and the Ford Edsel.
As in tablets and smartphones , with the iPod Microsoft lost an early lead in a highly visible consumer market segment — one that was instrumental in defining digital convergence and disrupting industries, subjects that Microsoft talked about since the early s. While the iPod reestablished Apple, the iPhone is the driver of sales and profits at the company today. Even if Microsoft had been successful with Zune as an iPod clone — or even been successful with PlaysforSure — neither business would have delivered the same impact to its bottom line as Office and Windows do.
Part of the reason is that Microsoft was still very focused on Windows and Office, and would never have put as much focus on any product outside those areas as Apple did. Yet Microsoft still tried to compete directly with Apple, not ceding any big market opportunity to a direct competitor.
The iPod led to the iPhone and the iPad, but Microsoft should have seen that coming. They had investments in all the technology areas that comprised these products. One skill set that Microsoft lacked was the finely honed supply chain skills that Apple developed under Tim Cook.
While it had built and profitably sold accessories like mice and keyboard for years, more sophisticated hardware devices, at scale, were not as easy. The Xbox was a case in point, as the first two generations of hardware were plagued with issues. Despite the cost and reliability issues, Microsoft has proven it can build good hardware and software.
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