Microsoft: The Zune Goes To China

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By Douglas A. McIntyre Published

Microsoft (MSFT) wants more control of making the Zune, so it is putting up a factory in China, of all places. Perhaps labor costs are low there.

The Zune multimedia player has not sold very well. The Apple (AAPL) iPod continues to beat it up and take its lunch money. As MarketWatch points out: "Microsoft has said it expects to sell more than 1 million Zune players by the end of the company’s fiscal year in June. By contrast, Apple shipped 10.5 million iPods in the March quarter alone."

The factory will make a new version of the Zune, perhaps called Zune 2.0. The new incarnation will be thinner and have Flash-based hardware. 

Microsoft was able to take a huge amount of share from the Sony Playstation and it took many years. Working over the iPod may prove harder.

Douglas A. McIntyre

Photo of Douglas A. McIntyre
About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.

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