The Case for the Zune iPhone App
Microsoft needs to develop a Zune app for the iPhone, right now. No, that's no a joke.
I'm sick, so here are my reasons in brief:
- PR - Microsoft gains a lot of PR ground. They can claim ubiquity on a great many platforms, and offer the excellent Zune pass streaming onto even a closed device like the iPhone (or, I suppose, the iPod Touch.) If Apple rejects the app, they can easily cry foul and the FCC, already ornery towards Apple about App Store rejections, might just raise a stink. If nothing else, Microsoft can sigh, shrug, and point to how anticompetitive Apple is, and how anti-consumer-choice their platforms are. You either get good Karma or good propoganda, either way it turns out.
- Switchers - When people have the option of subscribing to music and carrying it around on their iPhone, usable anywhere there's a network connection, they start to think. It becomes compelling. Bonus points to Microsoft if they can streamline the experience- since you get 5 tracks "to keep" per month, why not allow you to choose those songs in-app and have them emailed to you? Or automatically downloaded to your desktop?
The less-obvious plus here is that if given a good Zune App experience on the iPhone, the iPhone toting digirati might choose to get a Zune for that non-technical person in their life for Christmas. You can either hand Dad an iPod and tell him to fill it up for $.99 per track, or set him up with all the music he could possibly want and never have to worry about it again. - Subscriber Numbers - Microsoft needs to drive subscribers to the Zune service. If I own an iPhone with the app, an Xbox, and a Windows PC, the App appearing on iTunes may be the thing that tips me over the brink and makes me start using the service. And the more people you expose to this subscription service, the more that get hooked- and the more potential iPod Touch switchers you'll end up with.
- And lastly, it's a cheap thing to do. iPhone apps aren't hard to build, and the app could easily break even on new subscriptions.
