Wrong and Right
Well I was wrong on one thing–the Zune is getting a new feature. They will start supporting games–not apps in general, but just some games, very soon. Of course, this is the same thing that the iPod got some time ago, and Apple is soon moving on to more advanced stuff. But still, I got that one wrong.
But I got something else right: the Zune is a poor bet. So believes the gaming retailer GameStop, which has announced that it will stop selling Zunes. “We have decided to exit the Zune category because it just did not have the appeal we had anticipated,” said a GameStop spokesperson.
They probably just carried the Zune because Microsoft pressured them to, I’m guessing–the store is game-centered, after all. That fact is even more relevant since they decided to stop selling Zunes just before the Zune adds games to its repertoire. So for MS to be pressuring a retailer to sell its wares and yet have that retailer, dependent on MS’s other products (namely the X-Box line) drop those wares is a fairly significant sign of Microsoft’s waning power.