Speaker 1: Welcome to tech Stuff, a production from iHeartRadio. Hey there,
Speaker 1: and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host Jonathan Strickland.
Speaker 1: I'm an executive producer with iHeartRadio. And how the tech
Speaker 1: are you? Well, I've got a story to tell. Once
Speaker 1: upon a time, two companies like indignity, Apple and Microsoft
Speaker 1: were locked in a battle for the home computer market.
Speaker 1: Apple had started off with a few computer models named
Speaker 1: after the company itself, you know, the Apple and the
Speaker 1: Apple two, and then Apple two E and so on
Speaker 1: and so forth. Microsoft when a different route. Microsoft gained
Speaker 1: rights to various pieces of software. It developed some, but
Speaker 1: it essentially bought or from a certain point of view,
Speaker 1: maybe not stole, but it definitely hoodwinked some developers and
Speaker 1: ended up licensing out operating system software and things like that.
Speaker 1: So two very different approaches. So by the mid nineteen eighties,
Speaker 1: the struggle between Apple and Microsoft had intensified. Apple introduced
Speaker 1: the Macintosh computer with a graphical user interface or GUI GUY.
Speaker 1: In other words, Microsoft introduced Windows, its own Guy operating system,
Speaker 1: and while Microsoft wasn't making the hardware, the term Windows
Speaker 1: PC became shorthand it was almost as if Microsoft had
Speaker 1: been making the PCs itself. It wasn't it was just
Speaker 1: making the operating system on top of the PC. But
Speaker 1: then the operating system was in many ways more important
Speaker 1: than whomever made the machine itself, because the operating system
Speaker 1: would determine what kind of software you could run on
Speaker 1: the machine after all. Now, during the eighties and through
Speaker 1: the nineties, Apple was on the ropes for a lot
Speaker 1: of different reasons, which I've covered in other episodes of
Speaker 1: Tech Stuff. At one point, Apple co founder Steve Jobs
Speaker 1: left the company, with some versions of the story saying
Speaker 1: he was essentially fired. Other versions say he was just
Speaker 1: strongly encouraged to leave. Apple hit some really really rough
Speaker 1: waters and at one point it was in danger of
Speaker 1: going out of business. Then Apple actually brought Steve Jobs
Speaker 1: back kind of to act as a type of advisor.
Speaker 1: But it wasn't too long before Jobs regained control of
Speaker 1: the company he had co founded. That's also a very
Speaker 1: dramatic story. After that, Apple made a series of moves
Speaker 1: that would really turn things around for the company and
Speaker 1: set it on its path to become a trillion dollar company. Now,
Speaker 1: the interesting thing is, while Windows would retain a dominant
Speaker 1: hold on the business and home computer operating system markets.
Speaker 1: Apple would find new ways to become the company associated
Speaker 1: with entire technologies, and Apple wasn't inventing these technologies. Instead,
Speaker 1: the company was designing appealing products and then marketing the
Speaker 1: heck out of them. And one product that really helped
Speaker 1: turn Apple around was the iPod, Apple's digital music player,
Speaker 1: so a standalone device on which you would store and
Speaker 1: play music. Now, again, Apple did not invent the MP
Speaker 1: three player. It was not the first company to make one.
Speaker 1: They just made one that looked really nice, It worked well,
Speaker 1: it had some really cool features, and it really benefited
Speaker 1: from the power of Steve Jobs's presentation at various marketing events,
Speaker 1: and Apple was able to forge some alliance with various
Speaker 1: music labels over the next couple of years, and that
Speaker 1: helped create new opportunities, including the launch of the iTunes
Speaker 1: store in two thousand and three. So iTunes had been
Speaker 1: around before that, but iTunes first started out as software
Speaker 1: you would have on your computer and you would use
Speaker 1: iTunes to organize your music library, but you couldn't actually
Speaker 1: buy music from iTunes at first. Instead, you would buy
Speaker 1: a CD, a compact disc, put that in the optical
Speaker 1: drive of your Mac computer. And you would rip music
Speaker 1: from the CD and store it digitally within iTunes. That
Speaker 1: would be your organization software essentially, and that's how you
Speaker 1: would transfer music over to your iPod too. You would
Speaker 1: physically connect your iPod to your Mac and then you
Speaker 1: would port music over from your library on your Mac
Speaker 1: computer to your iPod. Now, with two years of negotiation,
Speaker 1: Steve Jobs was actually able to convince music labels to
Speaker 1: offer up digital tracks for individual purchase within iTunes itself,
Speaker 1: and that was the creation of the iTunes store, where
Speaker 1: instead of using it as just your means of organizing
Speaker 1: your music, it also became the way you could purchase
Speaker 1: new music. That would really push Apple to new heights.
Speaker 1: Microsoft was way behind on the MP three player space.
Speaker 1: They did not jump into that market early on, and
Speaker 1: Apple was able to essentially define that market. Microsoft eventually
Speaker 1: recognized that there was money to be made in the
Speaker 1: digital media player space, and the iPod had been out
Speaker 1: for several years, like five years, and then Microsoft decided
Speaker 1: they were going to try and create their own digital
Speaker 1: music player. Maybe this one could have some really innovative
Speaker 1: features that would set it apart. Designers could actually take
Speaker 1: the opportunity to learn about what worked with the iPod
Speaker 1: and what didn't work, or what people wish the iPod
Speaker 1: could do. They could take that information and use that
Speaker 1: to design a superior digital media player. They could have
Speaker 1: done that. They didn't succeed in doing that. They tried
Speaker 1: in some ways, but really it was a massive failure,
Speaker 1: and it's a shame because Apple's incredible success put aside.
Speaker 1: There were people who had notes, not musical notes, but
Speaker 1: like critical notes for the iPod. For example, for folks
Speaker 1: like myself, I did not own a mac computer. Now, initially,
Speaker 1: if you wanted an iPod, it would only work with
Speaker 1: Mac computers. You had to have a Macintosh in order
Speaker 1: to synchronize with an iPod. It did not work with
Speaker 1: Windows based machines. Later generations of the iPod and later
Speaker 1: generations of iTunes would change that, but initially you just
Speaker 1: couldn't do it. And if you did want to use
Speaker 1: a Windows based machine with an iPod that was compatible,
Speaker 1: you had to download iTunes. You had to install iTunes
Speaker 1: onto your Windows machine, and the Windows version of iTunes stunk, or,
Speaker 1: at least in my opinionion it stunk. iTunes could do
Speaker 1: some stuff that was legitimately useful. You know, it could
Speaker 1: detect when new tracks were added to your library, and
Speaker 1: then transferred just those new tracks to your iPod when
Speaker 1: you next connected your iPod to your computer. But at
Speaker 1: least on PC's, iTunes was very slow. It was clunky,
Speaker 1: It took up a ton of space on your computer,
Speaker 1: and it required a lot of your computer's assets to run,
Speaker 1: so everything else slowed to a crawl. It seemed like
Speaker 1: it was working great on Mac computers whenever I saw
Speaker 1: people in our interface with it, but my own experience
Speaker 1: was totally different. I hated iTunes on Windows. I thought
Speaker 1: of it as bloatwear or worse. And you couldn't interface
Speaker 1: with the iPod using any other kind of digital media
Speaker 1: organizational software. It had to be iTunes. So this meant
Speaker 1: that Microsoft actually had an opportunity to perhaps design a
Speaker 1: player and a software package that would work more smoothly
Speaker 1: for people who were Windows owners rather than Mac owners.
Speaker 1: That was a real opportunity for them. But even with
Speaker 1: a really good product, Microsoft still would have faced a
Speaker 1: truly tough challenge. Apple had really defined the MP three
Speaker 1: player landscape for five years. At that point, they had
Speaker 1: introduced an iPod capable of showing video. It had really
Speaker 1: great reviews. They had models that could hold up to
Speaker 1: like eighty gigs of material. It could be a storage product,
Speaker 1: so you could actually store files on your iPod, not
Speaker 1: just media files, but other types as well. There are
Speaker 1: a lot of reasons why the iPod was seen as
Speaker 1: a great product. I mean, heck, the iPod is why
Speaker 1: we call podcasts podcasts like we call it podcasts because
Speaker 1: Apple created this product that defined an entire generation of technology,
Speaker 1: so that brand was really entrenched in the minds of consumers.
Speaker 1: So even with a spectacular product, Microsoft was going to
Speaker 1: face uphill battle. But it wasn't a spectacular product, so
Speaker 1: the battle was even harder. The very first Microsoft Zoon
Speaker 1: was originally just called the Zoon, but later on Microsoft
Speaker 1: called it the Zoon thirty, and the thirty in this
Speaker 1: case references the amount of storage available on the device.
Speaker 1: It had a thirty gigabyte hard drive. A company called
Speaker 1: Freescale made the processor that ran in the Zoom thirty.
Speaker 1: It also made the processor for another digital player called
Speaker 1: the Tashiba Gigabeat S. In fact, the Zoon resembled the
Speaker 1: Tashiba Gigabeat S in many many ways, like it almost
Speaker 1: was as if the Zoon was essentially a Gigabeit s
Speaker 1: from Tashiba that had gone through a little bit of
Speaker 1: a redesign that changed the dimensions of the player and
Speaker 1: maybe some some aesthetics, but otherwise it looked like it
Speaker 1: was very similar to the Gigabeat s. And that's because
Speaker 1: that's what it happened. Microsoft didn't really build the Zoon
Speaker 1: to Shiba did. Microsoft made some changes to the design,
Speaker 1: but they were mostly cosmetic in nature. So Freescale used
Speaker 1: to be a division within Motorola until two thousand and
Speaker 1: four when Motorola divested the division and it became Freescale.
Speaker 1: In twenty fifteen, Freescale would become absorbed into a company
Speaker 1: called NXP Semiconductors. So the Zoom came out in a
Speaker 1: brief span of time where Freescale was its own company,
Speaker 1: And unfortunately, someone made a booboo with the drivers for
Speaker 1: the Freescale processors that went into both the Zoom thirty
Speaker 1: and the Gigabeat s. It was a booboo that wouldn't
Speaker 1: become noticeable for a couple of years, which is foreshadowing.
Speaker 1: We'll talk about it when we get there. Okay, before
Speaker 1: we go any further. Let's take a quick break. Okay,
Speaker 1: we're back. So when the Zoon thirty launched, initially you
Speaker 1: could get it in one of three colors. There was
Speaker 1: like a pearl white, there was black, and there was brown.
Speaker 1: I have no idea what made Microsoft think that brown
Speaker 1: would be a sought after color for an MP three player.
Speaker 1: I don't know how they didn't anticipate that this was
Speaker 1: going to create a whole bunch of jokes about the
Speaker 1: nature of that MP three player. It's like they were
Speaker 1: setting themselves up to be hazed. Surely someone at Microsoft
Speaker 1: at some point said, guys, this might not be a
Speaker 1: good idea, and yet they went with it. So the
Speaker 1: original Zoon had a three inch screen and a four
Speaker 1: x three aspect ratio, so taller than it was wide.
Speaker 1: This was a much larger screen than what you could
Speaker 1: find on the iPod at the time. That was really impressive, right,
Speaker 1: Like it was a bigger device than the iPod. It
Speaker 1: was definitely thicker too, Like it was a chonky boy,
Speaker 1: as they might say, And it was gonna be a
Speaker 1: hefty piece of plastic that you were gonna hold in
Speaker 1: your pocket if you're going to walk around with one
Speaker 1: of these things. But the screen was very large, which
Speaker 1: was impressive. The UI was pretty nice too, at least
Speaker 1: on a surface level. It did turn out that the
Speaker 1: resolution of that larger screen was actually the exact same
Speaker 1: resolution as the smaller iPod screen, which means that images
Speaker 1: shown on the iPod would appear sharper than those that
Speaker 1: you would see on the Zoon because you had the
Speaker 1: exact same resolution, but the Zoon had a larger screen,
Speaker 1: so same resolution, but an in large screen means that
Speaker 1: the images on that screen are blurrier. It could play video,
Speaker 1: but it was kind of immaterial because you couldn't just
Speaker 1: use video from any source, and the Zoom marketplace didn't
Speaker 1: have video on it, so you couldn't purchase video to
Speaker 1: play on it. It could technically support it, but there
Speaker 1: wasn't really any way to get video onto it, at
Speaker 1: least initially. It ran a custom version of Microsoft's Portable
Speaker 1: Media Center software. The user interface, the actual controls, well,
Speaker 1: it had a circular dpad like It didn't look like
Speaker 1: a dpad. It looked like a click wheel like if
Speaker 1: you think of the old iPods, they had a mechanical
Speaker 1: wheel where you would put your thumb on this wheel,
Speaker 1: and you would spin the wheel in order to navigate
Speaker 1: through the menus. That's what this thing looked like. It had.
Speaker 1: It looked like a very similar control mechanism, but no,
Speaker 1: it was just a dpad in the form of a circle,
Speaker 1: and then in the center of the circle was a
Speaker 1: button that you could use to select stuff. So, like
Speaker 1: a dpad on a game controller, you would push up, down, left,
Speaker 1: or right to navigate through menus and then use that
Speaker 1: center button to make a selection. So, uh, kind of
Speaker 1: a bummer because it looked like the control was meant
Speaker 1: to be more tactile and touch based, and it's not.
Speaker 1: It was just a dpad. The Zoom did have a
Speaker 1: couple of neat features, however, it had Wi Fi capability.
Speaker 1: The Zoon thirty had Wi Fi sort of, so you
Speaker 1: could use the Zoon's Wi Fi to connect with another
Speaker 1: Zoon that was in the same local space that you
Speaker 1: were in, like the same room or whatever, and then
Speaker 1: the two Zoon owners could share songs and even photos
Speaker 1: between the two different Zoon devices. So if you had
Speaker 1: a photo on your device, which by the way, there's
Speaker 1: no camera on the Zoon, so you had to have
Speaker 1: loaded this photo on from your computer. Or maybe you
Speaker 1: have a music track you really liked and you wanted
Speaker 1: to share it with your buddy who also happens to
Speaker 1: have a Zoon. You could use this method and send
Speaker 1: that music file over to your buddy. But if you
Speaker 1: wanted to purchase a song and put it on your Zoom,
Speaker 1: you couldn't do it wirelessly. You still had to do
Speaker 1: the old tethered connection. You'd purchase the song through the
Speaker 1: Zoom marketplace on your computer. You would tether your Zoom
Speaker 1: to the computer and then transfer the music that way.
Speaker 1: Now let's say you did somehow find the other person
Speaker 1: in your town who also owned a Zoom, and the
Speaker 1: two of you decided that you wanted to exchange a song.
Speaker 1: You could do that. If you were close enough to them,
Speaker 1: you could send them a track, but they would have
Speaker 1: just three days to access that track, and they can
Speaker 1: play it a maximum of three times and then it
Speaker 1: would just delete itself off their device, So after three
Speaker 1: days or after three plays, that song would disappear. They
Speaker 1: called this feature, and I can't believe it to this
Speaker 1: day that they did this. This is like the Brown
Speaker 1: Zoon decision. They called this feature squirting. So you would
Speaker 1: squirt a music track to another Zoom user. And I
Speaker 1: know it sounds like I'm making a joke, I am not.
Speaker 1: An actual company created a brown MP three player that
Speaker 1: could squirt music at other MP three players, and yes,
Speaker 1: everybody made fun of this. For ages, you couldn't listen
Speaker 1: to a tech podcast, you couldn't read an article without
Speaker 1: some commentary on the topic of squirting. This was the
Speaker 1: extent of the Zoom thirties Wi Fi capabilities. Was just
Speaker 1: sending these files a short distance to another Zoon. That
Speaker 1: was it. And like Apple, Microsoft went with a proprietary
Speaker 1: cable when it came to connecting to the zooon to
Speaker 1: charge it or to transfer to the Zoon did have
Speaker 1: one other thing that I thought was pretty cool. It
Speaker 1: had an FM radio built into it, and I thought
Speaker 1: that was kind of neat. So like Microsoft was trying
Speaker 1: to position this as it's a music device, not just
Speaker 1: for digital files but also to access radio. But Microsoft
Speaker 1: didn't really learn a whole lot about what people disliked
Speaker 1: about the iPod because they made several of the same choices.
Speaker 1: So one of the big drawbacks of the original Zoon
Speaker 1: was that it would only work with files that had
Speaker 1: a certain kind of DRM attached to them. DRM stands
Speaker 1: for Digital Rights Management, and the whole purpose of DRM
Speaker 1: is to prevent people from being able to pirate stuff,
Speaker 1: to steal things, or to download stuff without permission. But
Speaker 1: even DRM that Microsoft itself had designed before the Zoon
Speaker 1: came out wouldn't work on the Zoon itself. It wasn't
Speaker 1: backwards compatible with Microsoft's own DRM history, and that's because
Speaker 1: Microsoft introduced a new kind of DRM around the same
Speaker 1: time that they launched the Zoom, and the Zoom would
Speaker 1: only be compatible with that version forward. And that meant
Speaker 1: that if you happened to already have a bunch of
Speaker 1: music tracks that had the earlier version of Microsoft's DRM
Speaker 1: on them, they would not work with your Zoom. So
Speaker 1: this was very discouraging, right if you already had a
Speaker 1: sizeable digital library and you were just excited about getting
Speaker 1: a player where you could put the library on the player,
Speaker 1: it would be very upsetting to find out, Oh, you can't,
Speaker 1: because that has the wrong DRM on it. Like in
Speaker 1: the history of technology, DRM I think has long proven
Speaker 1: to be more of a frustration for legitimate users than
Speaker 1: it has been a deterrent for piracy pirates. Figure out
Speaker 1: ways around DRM, which means DRM ultimately just becomes a
Speaker 1: frustrating experience for people who legitimately purchased the item. So
Speaker 1: DRM is bad, is what I'm saying. Like it doesn't
Speaker 1: do what it's supposed to do, and then it does
Speaker 1: do stuff it's not supposed to do. That's the definition
Speaker 1: of a bad product. Anyway. Microsoft also did something supremely
Speaker 1: stupid in my opinion, that it had previously done with
Speaker 1: its Xbox Marketplace, which is, instead of having Zoom users
Speaker 1: buy tracks with you know, real money, you first had
Speaker 1: to go through this process of purchasing Microsoft points and
Speaker 1: then using the Microsoft points to get tracks so you
Speaker 1: would redeem points for tracks. So there was this middle
Speaker 1: step that was really frustrating. Part of this was to
Speaker 1: obfuscate how expensive a track was, right because they didn't
Speaker 1: have a dollar amount associated with it, just a number
Speaker 1: of points, and you would have to do the math
Speaker 1: in your head to figure out, okay, well, how many
Speaker 1: points is equivalent to a dollar, right, But you never
Speaker 1: could buy them in increments of a dollar. It would
Speaker 1: always be like five dollars or more. So that also
Speaker 1: meant that if all you wanted to do was buy
Speaker 1: one track, you actually had to spend five bucks to
Speaker 1: do it, not a dollar, but five dollars just to
Speaker 1: get the points, and then you would end up with
Speaker 1: this bank of Microsoft points just sitting in your account
Speaker 1: doing nothing. So this Microsoft was not the only company
Speaker 1: to ever do this. I mean Disney did this at
Speaker 1: their parks. They had something called Disney dollars, and they
Speaker 1: were encouraging people to spend their real money to buy
Speaker 1: theme park currency, where you couldn't use that currency anywhere
Speaker 1: else but inside those theme parks. Knowing that at least
Speaker 1: some of your money was just going to be wasted
Speaker 1: on this currency. You wouldn't be able to redeem all
Speaker 1: of it, so you would actually spend more money at
Speaker 1: the parks, but you wouldn't get value out of all
Speaker 1: the money you spent because some of it would just
Speaker 1: be caught up in this fake currency and you don't
Speaker 1: have enough of it to do anything useful. Microsoft Points
Speaker 1: were the same way. Ultimately, Microsoft would back off of
Speaker 1: the system on the Xbox marketplace, but they were still
Speaker 1: going strong with it when the Zoon launched. Okay, we're
Speaker 1: going to take another quick break. I've got some more
Speaker 1: things to say about the Zoo before we wrap up.
Speaker 1: All right, we're back. I'm not done slagging off on
Speaker 1: the Zoon yet. Unlike the original iPod, the Zoon could
Speaker 1: not be used as a storage device for other files. Right.
Speaker 1: Like I had mentioned that that was one of the
Speaker 1: things you could use an iPod for. You could store
Speaker 1: files on it, you could use it like an external
Speaker 1: hard drive. You could not do that with the Zooon.
Speaker 1: It also didn't support lossless file formats like wave files
Speaker 1: or wave files if you preferred WAV. Lossless means that
Speaker 1: when you create that digital file, you haven't lost any
Speaker 1: of the information contained within that file. So when you
Speaker 1: convert music into a digital file, a lossless form factor
Speaker 1: means everything that was in that recording is there. Blossy
Speaker 1: means that the process of making that file will actually
Speaker 1: eliminate some information. Ideally, it's information that wouldn't affect your
Speaker 1: experience listening to the audio file, but the quality typically
Speaker 1: takes a hit, whereas lossless, y're getting the highest quality
Speaker 1: possible based upon whatever recording procedure was used. So reviews
Speaker 1: said that Zoon's playback quality was good despite the lack
Speaker 1: of support for lossless audio, but it also said like
Speaker 1: album art despite being shown on a larger screen than
Speaker 1: the iPod didn't look very good. And again it's because
Speaker 1: of those resolution issues. So Microsoft pushes out the first
Speaker 1: Zoon in two thousand and six. That's unfortunate wording. I
Speaker 1: probably should have said something else. Anyway, that year to
Speaker 1: two thousand and six, Apple sold nearly thirty nine and
Speaker 1: a half million iPods. Now that was impressive because up
Speaker 1: until two thousand and six, collectively, across every single generation
Speaker 1: of iPod, Apple had sold around forty million units, and
Speaker 1: in two thousand and six they sold nearly as many
Speaker 1: just in that one year. So in other words, like
Speaker 1: in one year, they doubled the number of iPods they
Speaker 1: had sold throughout the history of the product. So Apple
Speaker 1: really was in the dominant position for the digital media
Speaker 1: player space. So how did the Zoom do well the
Speaker 1: first couple of weeks? It did okay. Initially sales were slow,
Speaker 1: but CNN reported at the end of the second week
Speaker 1: that had moved into the number two spot for digital
Speaker 1: media players. That does kind of ignore the fact that
Speaker 1: the number one spot was light years ahead of it,
Speaker 1: Like it wasn't even close, And being one and two
Speaker 1: doesn't mean so much. If if number one is like
Speaker 1: fifty miles ahead of you in a foot race. Microsoft,
Speaker 1: in a rush to try and make up for five
Speaker 1: years of lost time, had launched a bit of a flop.
Speaker 1: It was received fairly well critically. The critics didn't hate it.
Speaker 1: They did point out some of the downsides and the
Speaker 1: ways that the Zoon failed to live up to the
Speaker 1: standard of the iPod, as well as some of the
Speaker 1: things that were really interesting that Microsoft had done. But
Speaker 1: there were a lot of things to criticize. So Microsoft
Speaker 1: gets back to work and gets to work on the
Speaker 1: second generation of the Zoon. This generation would actually ditch
Speaker 1: that circular dpad and instead use a touch sensitive little surface.
Speaker 1: It was a quasi square, and I say quasi because
Speaker 1: it had rounded corners. It didn't have actual angular corners,
Speaker 1: but it was a surface where you could use touch
Speaker 1: commands to navigate through the UI, so different from a dpad.
Speaker 1: It also had some features that I think were pretty neat.
Speaker 1: Like say that you were listening to your FM radio
Speaker 1: on your Zoom and let's say a new song comes
Speaker 1: on and you really dig it, You've never heard it before,
Speaker 1: you really dig this song. You could actually flag the
Speaker 1: song on your Zoom and then when you connected to
Speaker 1: your Zoom to your computer, you could find that song
Speaker 1: in the Zoom marketplace and then purchase it. It made
Speaker 1: song discovery really interesting. I thought that legitimately was awesome.
Speaker 1: You can also download some games to the device. The
Speaker 1: user interface and the screen resolution were both improved with
Speaker 1: the second generation. But this generation of the Zoom launched
Speaker 1: in two thousand and seven. Two thousand and seven was
Speaker 1: also the year that Apple launched a pair of devices
Speaker 1: that ensured it would continue to dominate the mobile space.
Speaker 1: The first was the iPhone, and ultimately the iPhone would
Speaker 1: lead the way to the decline of standalone digital media
Speaker 1: players in general, including Apple's own media players. The other
Speaker 1: device was the iPod Touch, which was like an iPhone
Speaker 1: without the phone part. And when you stack the iPhone,
Speaker 1: or rather the iPod Touch against the second generation Zoon,
Speaker 1: there was just no comparison, Like the iPod Touch was
Speaker 1: like a sexy Lamborghini and the second generation Zoon was
Speaker 1: like a decent car. And you have to remember Apple
Speaker 1: still dominated the iTunes space, like almost all downloads of
Speaker 1: purchase music were through iTunes, so Apple had just this
Speaker 1: almost a monopoly like hold on the whole ecosystem of
Speaker 1: digital music at this point. Now we're also chronologically getting
Speaker 1: to the point where another problem with the original zoon
Speaker 1: cropped up. I had hinted at it before with the
Speaker 1: foreshadowing comment, So you remember I said someone at Freescale
Speaker 1: made a booboo when designing the driver for the processor
Speaker 1: that was found both in the Zoom thirty and the
Speaker 1: Tashiba gigabeat s. Well, that booboo failed to account for
Speaker 1: the fact that two thousand and eight was a leap year.
Speaker 1: So at midnight Pacific Standard time on December thirty first,
Speaker 1: two thousand and eight, as the West coast of the
Speaker 1: United States prepared to ring in the new year, Zoom
Speaker 1: thirties stopped working. They froze. The gigabeat s devices out
Speaker 1: there also froze. They were frozen or bricked, at least temporarily,
Speaker 1: and it took a little bit for folks to figure
Speaker 1: out what had happened. And it was again because of
Speaker 1: the failure to account for a leap year. It saw
Speaker 1: that there were three hundred and sixty six days in
Speaker 1: the year, and it didn't know what to do, and
Speaker 1: it got caught in a kind of loop that meant
Speaker 1: that the device was frozen. Now, the fix was actually
Speaker 1: pretty simple. All users had to do was keep their
Speaker 1: frozen Zoom thirties and as well as you know, Gigabeat's
Speaker 1: on and just let the battery drain completely. Once the
Speaker 1: battery was completely drained, they would just hold off on
Speaker 1: recharging their device until it was after noon on January
Speaker 1: first of two thousand and nine. Once that time had passed,
Speaker 1: they could charge it back up and the device would
Speaker 1: reset and it would work again. But this was another
Speaker 1: embarrassing misstep for the original Zoom. Microsoft did take one
Speaker 1: more swing with the third generation of the Zoo in
Speaker 1: two thousand and nine. This would be the Zoon HD.
Speaker 1: It was an answer to Apple's iPod Touch. So, like
Speaker 1: the iPod Touch, it had a display that was a
Speaker 1: touch display. It got rid of all the little physical
Speaker 1: buttons and stuff for you to navigate through. Everything was
Speaker 1: touch oriented. And the problem was the Zoon HD came
Speaker 1: out in two thousand and nine. The iPod Touch had
Speaker 1: come out in two thousand and seven, so again Apple
Speaker 1: had had a couple of years had start, Plus there
Speaker 1: were some other things going on now. The Zoo HD
Speaker 1: introduced some cool features like wireless synchronization as well as
Speaker 1: wireless web access, so you could use it as a
Speaker 1: wireless mobile device, but you could do that with the
Speaker 1: iPod Touch as well. And at this time the writing
Speaker 1: was starting to show up on the wall for the
Speaker 1: standalone media playing device, whether it was a Zoom or
Speaker 1: an iPod or anything else, because people were starting to
Speaker 1: use their smartphones to play media instead of having a
Speaker 1: standalone device dedicated to it. Why would you carry two
Speaker 1: devices around if one can do the trick. So consumer
Speaker 1: opinions were starting to shift toward accepting streaming as a
Speaker 1: music delivery service. So early on people were not really
Speaker 1: keen on the idea of streaming. They wanted to be
Speaker 1: able to own the tracks they loved and not rely
Speaker 1: on a service to continue to offer the tracks they
Speaker 1: loved in perpetuity, which you know these days when you
Speaker 1: look at different streaming platforms, specifically like streaming video platforms,
Speaker 1: you see cases where a platform loses the rights to
Speaker 1: a particular type of media and then you can't access
Speaker 1: it anymore on that platform. That's a real problem, right.
Speaker 1: It's a problem that you avoid if you purchase the
Speaker 1: media and you have it in a format that you
Speaker 1: can still access no matter what happens to the platform.
Speaker 1: That's different, and that's what people really were worried about
Speaker 1: back in when they were, you know, buying digital tracks
Speaker 1: rather than streaming. But eventually streaming went out and it
Speaker 1: became a more acceptable delivery system. Apple was still miles
Speaker 1: ahead at this point, so Microsoft decided to call it
Speaker 1: quits in twenty eleven, having never made a huge debt
Speaker 1: in the market, so the Zoom launched in two thousand
Speaker 1: and six, Microsoft discontinued it five years later. So Zoom
Speaker 1: launched five years too late and only lasted five years.
Speaker 1: This would not be the only time Microsoft would have
Speaker 1: to admit defeat in the hardware space, but we'll talk
Speaker 1: about the Windows Phone debacle another day. Today, the Zoon
Speaker 1: is remembered primarily as a joke. In fact, it was
Speaker 1: used as a joke in the Guardians of the Galaxy movies.
Speaker 1: The product itself wasn't necessarily bad. It was just introduced
Speaker 1: far too late and without the features needed to set
Speaker 1: it apart from the standard defining iPod. But I think
Speaker 1: we can all agree the marketing around it was truly terrible,
Speaker 1: and that is the down and dirty story of the Zoom.
Speaker 1: If you had one, I'd be curious to hear from you.
Speaker 1: You can always tweet at me on Twitter. It's tech stuff,
Speaker 1: hsw I too need to get another way for people
Speaker 1: to reach out because I can totally understand folks not
Speaker 1: wanting to go to Twitter. But yeah, I'm curious for
Speaker 1: the zoon owners out there what they thought of the device.
Speaker 1: Did they like it? What features did they really love?
Speaker 1: Were there any things that really irritated them about the Zoo?
Speaker 1: I mean, I'm speaking as someone. My first MP three
Speaker 1: player was not an iPod. I had a creative Zen
Speaker 1: MP three player, and golly, I loved that thing. It
Speaker 1: was not perfect by a long stretch. It had a
Speaker 1: lot of issues, but it worked for what I needed
Speaker 1: it to do. And I didn't have to use iTunes
Speaker 1: to access it, so that was a big bonus. But
Speaker 1: I'm curious what Zoo owners thought about their devices. And
Speaker 1: it's a shame really that Microsoft wasn't able to compete
Speaker 1: more in the space. And I say that because when
Speaker 1: you have competition, it really pushes companies to try and
Speaker 1: outperform each other. Apple was going hard anyway, They had
Speaker 1: the lead spot and they just kept going hard. They
Speaker 1: probably didn't need to go as hard as they did,
Speaker 1: but we ended up with really good devices as a
Speaker 1: result of that. But you can't always count on that, right.
Speaker 1: If a company dominates a market, they don't necessarily need
Speaker 1: to try to maintain their market position, Whereas when there's competition,
Speaker 1: companies do have to try in order to win over customers.
Speaker 1: So that's kind of why I'm always bombed when something fails.
Speaker 1: It might have been a complete ridiculous show from beginning
Speaker 1: to end because of silly decisions. But I don't want
Speaker 1: to see failures because I want to see competition so
Speaker 1: that we get even better stuff on the other end
Speaker 1: of it. That's it for this episode. I hope you
Speaker 1: enjoyed it. I hope you are all well, and I'll
Speaker 1: talk to you again really soon. Tech Stuff is an
Speaker 1: iHeartRadio production. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app,
Speaker 1: Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.