Wednesday, January 16, 2008
Globe and Mail has Q&A with Robbie Bach
Posted by Jason Dunn in "Zune News" @ 11:55 AM
Matt Harley has a brief Q&A with head man Robbie Bach about the Zune launching in Canada, and in response to the question "Zune Marketplace and Zune Pass aren't part of the launch, what is the reason behind that?", here's what Bach had to say:
“It turns out the vast majority of music on people's devices is music they have ripped rather than bought from an [online] store. So over time, do we want to make those things available in other areas? The answer is sure, but we've had a lot of demand just to get the devices. People have all their music on their hard drives and they want to be able to put them onto a device and we think it's a good opportunity for us to get into the market. So we're optimizing for reaching out to those sets of customers especially since the United States and Canada are so close to each other, we want to make sure people have that opportunity.”
That makes sense, but it makes you wonder why they didn't launch the Zune v1 in Canada last year then - or perhaps they realized it wasn't the product they wanted it to be and wanted to wait for the v2 product. Either way, it bodes well for seeing the Zune launch in other markets around the world this year. The rest of the article has a few other interesting bits of info, although I would have asked Bach why the Canadian Xbox video marketplace launch was so lacklustre.
“It turns out the vast majority of music on people's devices is music they have ripped rather than bought from an [online] store. So over time, do we want to make those things available in other areas? The answer is sure, but we've had a lot of demand just to get the devices. People have all their music on their hard drives and they want to be able to put them onto a device and we think it's a good opportunity for us to get into the market. So we're optimizing for reaching out to those sets of customers especially since the United States and Canada are so close to each other, we want to make sure people have that opportunity.”
That makes sense, but it makes you wonder why they didn't launch the Zune v1 in Canada last year then - or perhaps they realized it wasn't the product they wanted it to be and wanted to wait for the v2 product. Either way, it bodes well for seeing the Zune launch in other markets around the world this year. The rest of the article has a few other interesting bits of info, although I would have asked Bach why the Canadian Xbox video marketplace launch was so lacklustre.
