Zune and zune subscription music were not half baked though. I used it for years. It was simply ahead of its time. Even jobs said subscription music would never be a thing because ppl want to own their music.
It was definitely ahead of its time, because people forget about what makes Spotify/Apple Music/Google Play so much better than purchased music: Persistent Internet Connection.
The iPod, Zune, and Creative Nomad existed for something like 7 or more years before smartphones came around.
It's great that you could subscribe to a music service and sync with whatever songs you wanted, but that doesn't seem terribly useful compared to purchasing albums if you have no ability to queue up any song on demand.
Spotify feels more like unlimited access than those subscription services ever did.
As for Jobs' opinion, I think he mostly just held very personal feelings toward albums as a dude who grew up in the classic rock era. Plus, at the time, subscription services existed and just weren't very popular (see above).
Re:What to Expect from Marzipan
by scarface74 on Friday May 10, 2019 @08:04AM
(#19876942)
Jobs saw the train wrecks of previous subscription services like Pressplay that came out in 2001.
I think it also had to do with their sheer size. Researching stuff is fine, but in many cases they were pushing out half-baked solution with the force of the herd of elephants that Microsoft is. Had a company 1/100th their size tried the same thing, no big deal, just ignore it.
But when a company worth $1tn these days does the same thing, whatever they're promoting is seen everywhere.
They really needed something in-between Microsoft Research (research almost nobody sees) and full blown Microsoft. Maybe a Microsoft Skunkworks Startup? :)