The Power of Buzz, or What to learn from the iPhone launch

Waiting for the Latest in Wizardry – New York Times

I don’t really care too much about the iPhone, but the buzz around it is truely stuff of ledgend.  All the secrecy, all the hype… the rate plan announcement made headlines.  THE RATE PLAN!!!  Companies would kill for this kind of buzz (so might Cheney but that’s a different story).

At the Apple store on Fifth Avenue in New York, the first in line are already camped out. Sightings of the device already in the possession of a privileged few were being reported, even photographed and posted on the Internet. Rumors have it that shipments are arriving in the dark of night, accompanied by armed guards.

“It’s masterful when you really think about it,” said Jeremy Horwitz, the editor in chief of iLounge, a popular online publication read by iPod and iTunes users. “Ask yourself how many companies can announce a product six months in advance and not just sustain public interest but even build the frenzy. It’s staggering to me.”

Pre-introduction product hype and hysteria is not new, of course. Just ask any 12-year-old Harry Potter fan or middle-age Star Wars cultist. Last year, video game addicts slept on sidewalks outside Sony stores to be the first to buy the PlayStation 3. But ever since Apple first let the world know about the Macintosh computer in 1984, with its Super Bowl commercial, the company has become the standard-bearer in drum roll marketing for consumer electronics.

Microsoft Zune Passes the Million Unit Mark

Microsoft “v. pleased” with brown MP3 player sales (and brown flight suit) – Computerworld Blogs:   Microsoft has beaten its goal of shipping over a million Zune digital music players by June, capturing a 10 percent market share in the hard-disk-based music player category, said Robbie Bach, the president of Microsoft’s Entertainment and Devices Division.

    ”It’s a good start. It’s not an overwhelming start. I’m not going to pretend it’s some gigantic move,” said Bach.   It took the iPod 14 months to reach 600,000 shipments, but it was much earlier in the game than the Zune, when the market for digital music players wasn’t so hot. Apple has likely sold around 25 million iPods over the same time it has taken the Zune to reach its goal, according to financial analysts.   Those numbers include the much less expensive low end iPod shuffles and the somewhat less expensive flash memroy models.  Still M$ is no Apple and Apple is winning this battle and this war.  We see where things go though.