allgeektout

There have been a lot of rumors flying around about a new touchscreen “Zune HD” that should be able to compete with the iPod touch. It seems that Microsoft isn’t ready to give up the fight for the mp3 market, which is what Steve Ballmer, the CEO of Microsoft, said when I spoke to him this January at the Consumer Electronics Show.

The Zune (Microsoft’s MP3 player) has been selling well recently, but it still hasn’t been selling quite as well as the iPod and the iPhone.  How are you going to try to appeal to the people who have an iPod or an iPhone?

It’s going to be tough for us to “beat” iPod.  Put the iPhone in a separate category because because I think we’ve outsold the iPhone for the last year with our Windows Mobile phones,but that’s not so much about Zune, that’s really about the phone stuff.

On  Zune, we’re going to do a good job,  we’re going to have a good product in the market. We’re going to take the Zune software and put it on other devices [like] Windows Mobile and Windows PCs. You’ll be able to get at the Zune stuff from things other than the Zune hardware.  That’s the basic idea.

In the hardware, I think the Apple’s going to be a little tough to beat.  We’re going to stay in the game and give them some competition, keep after them, but I think they’re going to be tough to beat.   That doesn’t mean we can’t beat them on phones, and of course we’ve beat them in PCs and in some other areas.