Should Microsoft Change Its Zune Marketplace Policy

At a time when everyone is trying their best to emulate the success of the iTunes App Store, Microsoft is heading in a completely opposite direction. Instead of releasing a public SDK for the new Zune HD, they have completely clamped down the Zune Marketplace and are handpicking the people who are going to develop software for the Zune.

Instead of giving a myriad collection of developers the chance to offer creative and diverse applications for the Zune HD, Microsoft has decided that it wants to offer only a few and select applications to Zune users. Coupled with the fact that the Zune Marketplace is not the richest online content store anyway, this could actually spell doom for the Zune like it always has in the past.

It has already been a few days after the Zune HD was released and right now there should be a steady buzz about all the cool things that you can do with it. But instead there is hardly a murmur around the thing. Not only does it not bring anything new to the PMP world, it hardly has all the things that make the iPod Touch what it is today. So it is rendered unable to compete with its primary rival in the market at the very inception.

Some analysts are actually of the opinion that the Microsoft is better off not taking Apple head-on in a market that was created and is dominated by Apple. But in that case, the Zune HD has to offer something different to the users. A feature or a collection of features that users want but cannot get anywhere else. The Zune HD does not offer anything like that. It does not do much out of the box and there aren’t too many things that you can readily download to make it more interesting.

Microsoft and a few other developers do have a handful of apps available on the Marketplace. They are well made apps. Microsoft offers their apps for free but there’s a catch. It injects fullscreen ads that you cannot skip. So you are stuck staring at 20-30 second ads and only after that does the app load. This is a model that is ancient and was proven to be a complete failure for digital content. People hate it and it makes them shy away from anything that makes them watch ads when they don’t want to. The TV and the Internet are not similar in any way. It is time Microsoft figured that one out.