Does this mean no more Zune tattoos? Don’t say it! This from Cnet, which reports on a Piper Jaffray consumer survey of teenagers. Or, as technology executives at Microsoft and elsewhere call them, the Most Important Demographic Group in the World. (MIDGW, for short.) It seems that teens, when asked what brand of music player they planned to buy, responded 100 percent iPod and 0 percent Zune. In Piper Jaffray’s fall 2008 survey, the Microsoft device was still coveted by 15 percent of teens. That’s a pretty big slide in a short period of time.One reason, of course, not addressed in the Cnet link, is that fewer consumers in general are buying dedicated MP3 players. Teens, like everyone else, want their music integrated into their smartphones. (Music-only players may survive best as tiny clip-on models.) And, fortunately for Microsoft, even if it pulls the plug on Zune (sob!), its Windows Mobile platform runs on many smartphones. It currently claims about 12 percent of that market–way behind Symbian, which powers Nokia, not too far behind RIM (BlackBerrry), and ahead of Apple. See the Boy Genius Report for a nice pie chart on that subject. Not that teens will care.
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