Like the scenario for Apple, Microsoft's website Zune.net has seen a 1,000% traffic increase on Christmas day over the previous week. However, even despite this surge, the iTunes store still had 30 times more visitors. Apparently, the Zune managed to do very well at its time of launch, reaching 9% of the hard drive MP3 player market share during the first week of its November launch, not taking Apple's online store iPod sales into account. After that week, Zune's market share fell to 2.1% during its second week according to the market research firm NDP Group and continued to decline to 1.9% by the second week of December, going by Playfuls.
SanDisk has managed to improve its market share to 18.4% in December, making it the 2nd largest in the hard drive MP3 player market, up from 17.5% last year. Despite all Zune's negative reviews and declining sales, Microsoft expects to reach its goal of 1 million sales by the end of June 2007 and would be really happy if they just meet this. Interestingly, Microsoft still believes that over time, the Zune will be the leader, particularly once more Zune models hit the market and the Zune hits international markets.
At this time of writing, going by Amazon's top selling electronic products, the black Apple 30GB iPod video and the Apple 1GB iPod Shuffle are ranking the top two spots respectively. The Zune is ranked way down at the 58th spot with, with 6 other iPod products, 6 SanDisk products and the Creative Zen Vision:M 30GB ranking above it. Just when most would presume vinyl records to be long obsolete, the Zune is even beaten by an LP vinyl Turntable at the 50th spot.
