This is me on TWiT
Had a fun time with Leo Laporte and Paul Thurrott on th TWiT network show, Windows Weekly. Give it a listen.
http://www.twit.tv/ww17
Leo asked a lot of the tough questions, but asked them nicely ;)
Saturday, March 10, 2007
http://www.twit.tv/ww17
Leo asked a lot of the tough questions, but asked them nicely ;)
About Me
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- Name: David Caulton
A Zune contributor by day, I'm also an avid hiker, biker, and father of three, I also work doing industry analysis and strategy. In previous lives, I've been a backcountry ski patroller, worked on the Windows Media Player, Microsoft Word, Microsoft Project, and Microsoft Team Manager 97, been a researcher in Cognitive Neuroscience, a grad student, and a kid.
17 Comments:
Great interview, really interesting to listen to - thanks
you repeatedly spoke about such things as user recommendations, online personal identities, etc, yet there seems little of that sort of thing available at this time. how will that work? will there be a separate section of zune.net, or will you rely on something outside of the zune site, possibly like spaces? how do you see this playing itself out, and how long do you think it will be before we begin to see such features?
Sounds blatently like Last FM angle you guys are going for. I bet my hat on it.
I had to work pretty hard to not reveal our roadmap to Leo; I'll try to do the same here.
I personally don't think the world needs another full service community ala facebook or myspace. Those are pretty entrenched and have huge network effects. Ironically, I also suspect they won't be that sticky, and will have a faddish nature ala studio 54 or the latest hot club. something new comes along and people will migrate.
in any case, I think there is opportunity for focussed communities, or community backends that feed other main communities. Think xbox 360 - not your main community for everything, but your gaming centric community.
So basically I can have a friends list within the Zune client, see what they are listening to, see what they recommend, their most played and favourite tracks, message them etc.
i get that you can't give a roadmap, but it seems that the kind of thing mentioned in the interview is exactly what the zune needs (or, at least, what would dramatically help) to attain the sort of critical mass that would actually make the "social" work. while i certainly wouldn't suggest you need the kind of elaborate social network of myspace, something scaled down would be nice, especially if it would allow you to create a widget, gadget, or whatever that could be embedded in your blog or any other online presence that would announce to others certain things like playlists you have, podcasts to which you are currently subscribed (only after you guys finally get that functionality integrated, of course), etc, something like a much more sophisticated gamercard.
without giving a "roadmap" can you say if there is anything even somewhat like that we can look forward to in the future?
oh yea, and i'm excited to hear the 360 mentioned so often in reference to the zune. as someone who already uses the 360 as the center of his media life thanks to its great games and ability to function as a media center extender, i sincerely hope you guys are focused on tighter 360/zune integration.
listening to it now, pretty good interview so far. I sincerely hope your vision for zune is implemented/realized.
Much like the others who posted I enjoyed listening to the interview with Leo and Paul, but there was one question that came up for me as I was listening. In the interview you mentioned that some time ago while the Zune was still in development, it was decided that the device would skew more toward capturing the mass market mp3 player consumer by sticking with the basics and bringing in more advanced features later.
I understand how this strategy seems like a sound business decision and why Microsoft or any company for that matter would choose to go in this direction.
My question to you is, in hindsight... Do you think the Zune would today have a stronger position in the market place if the device had targeted the tech community a bit more from the start?
It is my opinion that when it comes to technology the tech community is the lighthouse to which the mass consumer market and increasingly mass media as well, look to for advice and guidance when deciding which technology to purchase. It seems natural that gaining the admiration and acceptance of the tech community by including those advanced features which are most important to them, would have been of much greater benefit to Zune in the long term.
@ Jamel: I think the Zune is sufficiently tech-centric (the number of registry/dll tweaks for the software so far back me up on this) that the tech people stay happy. It's much easier to go from general to specific than the other way around, and there are enough tech-specific DAPs on the market that it'd be suicide to go against them. A large amount of techy people hate Microsoft, so it wouldn't catch on in the same way that it is now. It's interesting to see you write of the Zune as a long-standing product that has been around for a while, when in reality, it's been only four months since our little darling was launched.
As a previous owner of a Zen Vision: M, I can tell you the disadvantage of catering to the tech crowd. Microsoft did what they had to do, and I have faith that they will continue to add features to make it better.
The Social for music? Sounds like last.fm to me.
Checkitout:
http://www.last.fm/
What's the latest on the "March 20 release" of 1.3?
@ adam:
according to cesar at zuneinsider.com, the update is not coming today.
Yes, ahem...not today.
well, that's cryptic.
Ah, so it is. I see on Zune.net it says account creation's shutting down on the 27th. Coincidence? Probably.
So how are we supposed to believe anything you said (or didn't say) when the Zune team can't even hit a firmware (patch and fix really) when there supposed to?
Again for the upteenth time "THIS IS RIDICULOUS". I've told Cesar and you on multiple occasions that I want my Zune fixed! Static shut-downs, dramatic unexplained battery loss, skipping, syncing, and unexplained loss of media. Fix the issues then move on to the "bigger and better".
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