Mike Landman

Mike Landman

Observations On Business. Maybe a Little Preening. And A Few Lessons Learned.

Funny Feelings About The Zune

This is some email back and forth between a couple of my coworkers. I think there is a lesson in here about storytelling, strategy, and hubris.

The Zune. Is This A Joke?
I’ve got an idea. Let’s make a product to go up against the most successful consumer electronics product in the history of man. Then, two weeks before launch date let’s have the website still under construction (www.zune.com). Then let’s put a counter on it to show everyone how many people we could have marketed to. Last count 100K. Something tells me this one’s going to fail…

The response:

They can’t help it. The site runs on Vista Server.

That’s a joke. It actually runs on Win2000. Seriously. http://toolbar.netcraft.com/site_report?url=http://www.zune.com

But I’m not sure that domain even belongs to them. So instead try http://www.microsoft.com/zune.

Oops, they didn’t think to make that resolve to anything. An oversight, I’m sure.

So instead it’s https://www.comingzune.com/, which is really obvious and I’m surprised you didn’t immediately think of it.

But if you open that in Firefox on a Mac it will crash Firefox. True story.

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