What Can Enterprise Software Vendors Learn from Zune and Pre’s Failures?

We’re a bunch of gad­get geeks here on the Actional team. We’ve been through so many phones, it’d make for a good photo shoot. Mostly the trend was Win­dows Mobile to Black­berry, though I made a stop along the way at Sym­bian (the Nokia E61 was a fine phone when it came out!).

I remem­ber when Microsoft’s Zune came out, Dan Foody thought it was a really nice device. I vaguely recall him say­ing some­thing along the lines of it being much “bet­ter” than the iPod. “Bet­ter” mean­ing more cool tech­nol­ogy stuffed inside. Of course, the Zune hasn’t really made a dent in the market.

Palm’s Pre is sim­i­lar. Prob­a­bly a really sweet phone. Cer­tainly addresses the phys­i­cal key­board I know I missed when I briefly used an iPhone. It runs a lot of apps at once, and on it’s first release sup­ports cut-and-paste. I’m will­ing to bet it too will fail to make an impact on the market.

It’s obvi­ous to me why both these prod­ucts have failed (yes, I’m call­ing the Pre a fail­ure already).

It’s the whole prod­uct expe­ri­ence. What we say is that we want all the lat­est and great­est fea­tures, but what we do is all about the experience.

And, that is also my answer to Mike Kavis’ rant from the other day.

I kept start­ing to answer Mike via com­ments or a post of my own, but any time I started to write some­thing I couldn’t help but feel that I sounded like a defen­sive ven­dor spokesper­son. I fully agree with Mike, and hope the sit­u­a­tion changes. There are rea­sons for why it is the way it is, but we’ll save those for another time so as not to detract from my sup­port for Mike’s impor­tant points.

The take-away is that enter­prise soft­ware ven­dors need to start think­ing in terms of the customer’s whole prod­uct expe­ri­ence. Then, we’ll be able to make some progress.