Jay Allard: the man who created the Zune

In October, all employees of the Zune project worked hard to bring the player to the market in time. One day, they all received a letter with a link to a video from YouTube, in which the head of a rival company, Steve Jobs, reproached Microsoft for lack of creativity: “The only problem for Microsoft is that they have no taste,” says Jobs. “They have absolutely no taste.” The sender of this letter was J-Allard, 37, (J Allard), Zune project manager. He used an old, well-known way to increase staff motivation, BusinessWeek writes . Here is another interview with him at Engadget .



Jay Allard is one of the most talented managers of the “new wave” who showed themselves after the departure of the legendary Bill Gates. Only after that the youth got the opportunity to express themselves, whereas earlier they were not allowed to do this. For example, in 1994, Jay Allard sent out a warning to colleagues from Microsoft about the growing influence of the Internet and the need for a radical restructuring of the business (the letter remained in the story under the subject “Windows: The Killer Application for the Internet”), but no one listened to the 25-year-old Boston University. What is there to say if the domain name microsoft.com was registered five years after the competitors have already opened their sites.

In subsequent years, Jay Allard showed all his talent. It was he who, contrary to numerous voices of skeptics, created the Xbox game console from scratch, insisted on banning the use of the Windows operating system in it and enchantingly brought the console to the market (when he was appointed to this post, he changed the name of James to the letter “J” without a dot) and now the Xbox has become the second in the world in popularity among game consoles and will bring $ 4.6 billion this fiscal year. Thus, he helped turn Microsoft into a hardware company, which it is now. Microsoft is constantly expanding the range of manufactured equipment and is even going to design its own microprocessors . In general, Microsoft today is not at all the company that we used to see.
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Creating a Zune player in the shortest possible time is entirely due to Jay Allard. Suffice it to say that the entire project from the idea to the launch of the product on the market took only eight months , this is a record short period.

Of course, in eight months it was impossible to create the perfect product. It is in a hurry due to numerous flaws in the design, functionality and software Zune (about the same thing happened with the Xbox). But, knowing the talent of Microsoft Vice President Jay Allard, we can assume that all these shortcomings will be corrected. Although Microsoft has about a hundred vice-presidents, Jay is called the most likely successor to Bill Gates. His decision to introduce the functionality of WiFi into a music player can be called a brilliant idea, although now not everyone is aware of the full effect of this cardinal step of “tweaking” from a competitor.

The general manager perfectly represents what his team should strive for. He himself has been using iPods for a long time (now he has nine of them), listening mostly to heavy music. His work computer is the Apple G5. Several other strokes from the biography. A talented programmer, Allard wrote his first game at 12 years old (it was an economic simulator of lemonade trading). He met his wife at the university, where they were both recruited by Microsoft agents. Jay is keen on mountain biking and has repeatedly broken his bones, descending a mountain bike on steep slopes, when his heart beats at a frequency of 200 beats per minute. In general, this is very similar to the path that the Zune player will have to overcome in order to conquer the market.