I have been Ztumped
I’m now a proud owner of a Creative Zen Vision:M player. For those who do not know what I am talking about… Zen Vision is the iPod video’s nemesis.
Zen gives you value for your money! It cost me A$ 310 (a whole $40 cheaper than iPod 30GB Video) and it has an inbuilt Radio and Voice Recorder. Plus it plays most of your videos (XVID, DIVX, MP4 etc, etc). So no need to worry about converting stuff. (It comes with a converter too just in case!) It looks like an iPod and behaves like one too. Navigation is very simple (If you had an iPod before, getting used to this is a piece of cake) and the screen is sharp and crisp! Just so that you know i’m not being biased, I owned an IPod nano up until 2 weeks ago and I loved it.
So i was wondering why people prefer an iPod over the Zen when it is clearly the better choice? Quite honestly I have not come up with a good answer! But I found an unusual analogy from Sports!
Well I assume most of you know about cricket. And I’m certain you have heard or read about Shane Warne. The “King of Spin”. The world’s best wrist spinner and the best “leg break” bowler the world has ever known! He holds the record for the most number of wickets in test cricket. But how many of you have heard about Stuart MacGill? MacGill is another leg break bowler who played/plays (not exactly sure if he still plays for Australia) who came to the cricket scene just about the same time Warne was around. MacGill only played a handful of games since Warne was the preferred choice by the selectors. What you didn’t know is that MacGill has out performed Shane Warne most of the time they played side by side. Don’t get me wrong, Warne is the best around. But i think if MacGill was given the opportunity and played as many games, he would have been the better player. We will never know!
Popularity: 26% [?]
Adrian Sutton
May 28th, 2007 at 9:40 am
There are two reasons the iPod is so much more popular than the Zen:
1. The iPod is way cooler. Apple paid attention to style back at the start when the Zen focussed on features so Apple got all the street cred and it’s kept it. The white headphones were a particularly important marketing tool because they make it obvious that you’re listening to an iPod even when you can’t see the player itself.
2. The iPod has iTunes and iTunes is just plain fantastic. Geeks will often prefer something else, but everyday users find iTunes so simple to use and it’s so easy to load your songs onto your iPod.
Apple also paid attention to usability way before Zen ever did - these days the Zen has probably caught up, but originally the iPod was a shining light of simplicity while all the other players were very complex and hard to use (mostly because they kept packing in more and more features). The iPod was popular because it left out features that people weren’t using and that were making the players more complex.
As for Warne and MacGill - Warne was picked over MacGill because Warne got on well with the team whereas MacGill tended to cause conflicts. On field performance doesn’t matter much if you don’t get on with your team mates well.
Suneth’s Blog » Continued Innovation
August 12th, 2007 at 6:29 pm
[…] gives the your product the edge. The competition between iPod and Zen mp3 players proves this point. Clearly Zen offers more features but iPod seems to be the preferred choice since it looks and […]