A Million Fools and Their Money Have Been Parted

Somehow — Mind control? Bribes? “Buy this Zune or we’ll kill this puppy”? — a million Zunes will have been sold by the end of June, according to Robbie Bach, president of the Entertainment and Devices Division of Microsoft.

As good as this news is for Microsoft, this is even better news for you if you’re about to do some dog-and-pony shows for investors. You can simply pull out this story and say “This is why we’ll be able to find customers: somewhere, out there, are at least a million people who’ll buy anything.”

My apologies to the King for riffing on his album design.

Over at CrunchGear, Vince Veneziani put these numbers in context:

I can understand maybe a smaller company getting excited over selling a million devices, but Apple in Q4 of last year alone sold 14 million iPods. Yeah, 14 million people bought iPods. Now those Zunes seem pretty dinky in comparison, eh?

Other esteemed colleagues in the tech blogosphere are equally unimpressed. Engadget says:

While Bach sees that as a “good start” he admits that the Zune hasn’t quite gotten as social as the company would like, saying that “when your installed base is a million, the benefits of sharing, frankly, aren’t as wide as we hope to see in the future.” Unfortunately, Bach didn’t get very specific about any future Zune plans, choosing instead to talk up the pink and watermelon-colored Zunes, which’ll surely make all the difference.

Dan at UNEASYSilence:

This weekend I made a conscious decision to give my iPod a week off and go Zune only. Come on, the thought of access to unlimited subscription music, and FM radio (not a fan of the brown, but whatever). So, I kicked my second laptop into BootCamp, made the Vista plunge and installed the Zune software.

Long story short; the software installation process was quite possibly the worst experience ever, but that was quickly eclipsed by the HORRIFIC ass backwards annoying Zune software/syncing experience. After HOURS of coaxing I think I have the damn thing working. I’ll report back at the end of the week on how the rest of the experience was, but I am left puzzled HOW Microsoft sold a million of these to suckers customers?