La vida después de Zune

Hoy más que nunca, la relación entre tecnología y periodismo es inseparable . Este artículo de The Economist se refiere al lanzamiento de Zune, la plataforma de música y video portátil que Microsoft acaba de estrenar. Un alto ejecutivo de British Telecom dijo hace unas semanas en este semanario británico que la convergencia debiera significar la libertad de los consumidores para elegir y usar cualquier servicio en cualquier lugar. Y Zune parece ir en ese camino, como el interés de los medios de ampliar su capacidad de emitir noticias y programas en todas las plataformas posibles. En el texto se detallan virtudes y defectos de la nueva apuesta de Bill Gates, justo en un momento que Microsoft busca ampliar su espectro de negocios en la web.


Por The Economist

WHO in his right mind would step into the ring against
the iPod? Apple Computer's sleek music-player, and its
iTunes software and online store, dominate the
digital-music industry as comprehensively as
Microsoft's Windows operating system dominates desktop
computing. But just as Apple has tried for years to
loosen Microsoft's grip on computing, so Microsoft now
hopes to loosen Apple's hold on digital music. On
November 14th, the software giant will launch Zune, a
music-player that looks and works very much like an
iPod.

Zune is unlikely “to make any dent at all in Apple's
market share,” says Tim Bajarin of Creative
Strategies, a consultancy in Silicon Valley. But
Microsoft probably has no choice but to try, he adds.
During its first 25 years, he says, Microsoft
succeeded above all by bringing computer technology to
businesses; to succeed in its next 25 years, it must
turn its attention to consumer gadgets, for that is
where the innovation and growth will be. But the
formula with which Microsoft achieved its dominance in
the first round appears not to be working in the
second. So Zune is based on a very different business
model—evidence that Microsoft is changing.

Microsoft's music-player is a device that is tightly
coupled to music-library software that runs on a
computer, and to Zune Marketplace, an online music
store. The Zune device does not work with other online
stores, even those of Microsoft's partners; and Zune
Marketplace does not offer songs for non-Zune devices.
Zune, in other words, is a proprietary bundle of
hardware, software and service—exactly like Apple's
iPod-iTunes combination.

For Microsoft this amounts to an about-face shocking
enough that Robbie Bach, the executive who runs the
company's entertainment division and who devised the
strategy, goes out of his way to play down its
importance. Microsoft's traditional approach is to
stay out of hardware and concentrate on making
software, such as Windows, which it licenses to as
many hardware companies as possible. Competition turns
hardware into a low-margin commodity, but Microsoft,
as owner of the software standard, makes a fortune.

In recent years, Microsoft tried to use the same
approach with consumer technologies. It developed
music and video software and invited gadget-makers to
build hardware around it, and other firms to build
compatible online stores to sell content. This “flat
out didn't work,” says Matt Rosoff of Directions on
Microsoft, a specialist research firm. In the case of
music, Microsoft's PlaysForSure software proved flaky:
not all music from all stores would play for sure on
all players, and the iPod remained unchallenged.

So Microsoft has ditched the idea of providing
enabling software to other firms in favour of Apple's
approach of doing everything itself. Its first move in
this direction came with its Xbox games consoles, in
which hardware, software and an online service are
tightly coupled. (The Xbox division also reports to Mr
Bach.) Zune is much more controversial, however,
because Microsoft's pre-existing hardware and service
partners are left high and dry. “I've never seen a
business so blatantly screw its business partners,”
says Peter Sealey, a professor at Berkeley's Haas
School of Business.

The about-turn on digital music is not the only recent
shift in Microsoft's strategy. Having campaigned for
years against open-source software, it has lately
changed its stance. Last month it formed a partnership
with Zend, a small Israeli-American firm, to make PHP,
an open-source programming language that powers many
large websites, work better with Windows. And last
week it struck a deal with Novell, a long-time enemy
that is now a strong proponent of Linux, the
open-source operating system that competes with
Windows, to ensure that Windows and Linux can run
smoothly alongside each other on big computers.

This does not mean that Microsoft now thinks
open-source software is a good thing. It hopes to make
Windows more attractive to firms running large
websites, and by promoting Novell's flavour of Linux
as the natural partner for Windows it hopes to
undermine other flavours backed by Oracle, IBM and
Sun. But previously it would have nothing to do with
open source at all. Steve Ballmer, Microsoft's boss,
once called it a “cancer”.

Microsoft has also been shifting its business model
for delivering software in response to Google and
other firms that let users access e-mail, word
processing and other software via the web, rather than
installing software on their own computers. The
mission of Microsoft's new online-services division is
to become, in effect, an in-house Google, while Mr
Bach's division does its best to imitate Apple with
Zune.

As Microsoft borrows from Apple, the opposite is also
true. After failing to defeat Microsoft in operating
systems, Apple learned a valuable lesson and has
opened up its music technology just enough to make it
a standard. It licensed the iPod's connector-plug so
that other firms could make accessories for it, and it
made the iPod and iTunes available on Windows,
something that would once have been unthinkable. The
great irony of the epic rivalry between Apple and
Microsoft, says Mr Bajarin, is that the longer they
fight, the more they resemble each other.