from: www.wired.com
Zune is Second-Most Wanted Black Friday Item
According to online retailers PriceGrabber, Shopping.com, and uber-auctioneer eBay, the Zune player (in both its old Zune 30 guise and new Zune 80 duds) was the second-most purchased item on the web on Black Friday. Placing silver right behind the Wii system (which led wish lists for the second year in a row), this could be seen as a huge win for the visibility of Microsoft's digital offerings and the viability of the Zune as an adequate alternative to the iPod behemoth. The popularity of the player is credited in part to the affordability of the brown Zune and its new software update. So far, none of the credit is going to the Zune's 'squirting' abilities.
Other top gadgets noted by the retailers included the Maestro 3100, TomTom ONE, and Garmin's StreetPilot c550 GPS devices, Guitar Hero III, Microsoft's Office 2004 Student and Teacher edition, and a few Canon cameras.
But before Gates, Allard, and Co. start planning a party, it must be noted that Amazon and other individual company stores (such as Apple's) are not part of these numbers. So we'll wait until all the numbers come in before we crown true Black Friday and Cyber Monday champions– either way, no media player will come anywhere close to the Wii.
Other Black Friday notes: People spent about $272 million online on Thanksgiving Day in the U.S., and $531 million total on Black Friday. Outside the online world, the early estimate of Black Friday purchases is about 20 billion dollars. |