When Microsoft came late to the market with its Zune MP3 player, many industry watchers didn’t give the product much hope. Now gossip blog Valleywag is reporting that white Zunes were for sale on Wednesday for $150 each – half the suggested retail price – at Woot, a one-day sales online retailer known as a place to dump overstocked product. Does the deal spell doom Zune?
“According to an NPD Group report last May, the most recent data available, Microsoft had 2.3 percent of the portable music player market. Creative’s market share is 4 percent, SanDisk’s is 11.7, and Apple‘s is a whopping 70 percent. Microsoft’s fourth-place player may not have been doomed to certain failure at launch, but this selloff is certainly no sign of health.”
Micronet looked around at shopping.com and bizrate.com and found that Zunes could be found pretty easily for about $190. (Buydig.com for instance.) Best pices on comparable iPods seem to be around $250, but, admittedly, those price quotes are not from an exhaustive search.
