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Robbie Bach, president of Microsoft’s Entertainment and Devices Division, confirmed in an interview with the San Francisco Chronicle that the company has cleared the million mark. While he said that “a little over a million Zunes” translate into a 10% market share in the category of hard-disk-based digital audio players, Bach conceded that it wasn’t quite an “overwhelming” start: “I’m not going to pretend it’s some gigantic move,” he told the Chronicle.



However, Microsoft did reach its initial goal outlined last December by former VP Bryan Lee. At the time, Lee considered one million Zunes within a nine-month timeframe as potentially “awesome”. Compared to its rival, Apple’s iPod, Zune in fact appears to have done reasonably well: It took the iPod nearly two years to reach the one-million milestone. But, in fairness, the iPod launched in a time (2001) when the portable MP3 player was a toy for geeks and the market opportunity was hardly more than a niche. Microsoft, on the other side, launched Zune in a booming market and, in this perspective, a million sold devices suddenly do not look that “awesome” anymore. Zune has been in the market for 193 days (November 14, 2006 to May 25, 2007) in the U.S. market – which translates into about 5200 Zunes sold per day. About 30,000 stores in the U.S. are currently selling the player, which means that, on average, each store sold about 33 Zunes during this 193 day period – or one Zune every six days. Anyway, it’s still far away from promised iPod killer…