BrandBrains

Going back a few episodes of On Digital Media, I bet Ken and Chia-Lin each a bottle of wine that Microsoft wouldn’t become the iPod killer that it’s purported to be. Neither of them would take me up on that wager.

So, I put it out to our listeners and one brave soul responded: John Wall of The M Show took us up on our bet, but he wanted better odds. So, if we win the bet, John sends us a bottle of wine but if he wins, we send him a case of wine. I even volunteered to road trip to the Boston area to drop it off.

John suggested either a case of Two-Buck Chuck, since it makes a great Sangria or a case of Francis Coppola Rosso - nothing expensive - just good table wine.

What’s the objective criteria we’re going to use to determine the winner of the The Great Zune Wine Wager?

First, let’s look at Microsoft’s goals for the Zune. They’ve declared that they would be happy with 1 million Zunes sold by June of ‘007. Not exactly aggressive compared to the estimated 16 million iPods sold in Q4 ‘06, but we’ll give Microsoft the benefit of the late start.

Using that timeline, in Episode #18 we decided to use the silver-medal-winner of market share as the barometer of Microsoft’s success: SanDisk. SanDisk, with their nicely designed line of Sansa players, is the (distant) number two player in terms of market share for portable media players.

If Microsoft unseats SanDisk as the number two player in the market by June of this year, we’ll happily make our way up Bean Town to deliver (and share) some wine with Mr. Wall. Chia-Lin, Ken and I have already informed our significant others that this road trip could be a possibility, but we’ve also told them not to hold their collective breath.

The proposed road trip may coincide with PodCamp Boston for this year, so it could turn out to be an event full of stories worth sharing. (And some, probably not…)