It's a cycle
this post was submitted on 09 Jul 2023
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Problem was, I only ever met like 3 people rocking a Zune at my college. You needed to convince your friend group to adopt it with you.
And like 3 months after the Zune launched, the gadget everyone was talking about was the first iPhone. The Zune was too late to the party. Everyone was about to jump to touch screen smartphones.
I remember around 2010 when Nokia smartphones were really good and could do much more than iPhones, but the marketing had already taken hold. Anything not iPhone was not considered a smartphone. Ironically.
It's a good thing Andriod happened then.
IMHO, even though the OG iPhone lacked MMS, 3G, GPS, and even copy / paste, the web browsing, gestures, and software fit and finish were game changers that everyone scrambled to catch up with. Ditto with the App Store. iOS had an App marketplace that was pretty damn big by the time that Android phones started shipping.
IMHO, it wasn’t just marketing. There were compelling software features that made iOS something people wanted during 2007-2011
But back to the original point, the Zune kind of released right when everyone was migrating their music collections to smart phones. It was a terribly timed product.
And ironically, a lot of ground breaking touch screen work was being done in MS labs at the time. I remember seeing a lot of that demoed at conferences and in CS journals. If they had the foresight to apply that tech to their phones, the iPhone would’ve never taken off.