Zune

[billcoe]

Microjism is about to spend a fortune from it's warchest of stockpiled $$$$$$$$$ from it's monopolistic practices to toss an elbow into the music market.

 

ipods rule that game, and in typical MS fashon they will keep tossing $$ until their players stop crashing when you play Beatles songs, and the format they have been supporting (play for sure) gets ported so that it will eventually work with a Zune player...maybe later, but not now anyway: but why not open source and non-restricted Mp3s like emusic.com e-music or Rockbox Rockbox for your player

 

Discuss?

[G-spotter]

From a Forbes blog article entitled "Zune Stinks":

 

I say this having never actually used a Zune, since so far sneak peeks of the gadget appear to have been limited to the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times. But I don't have to handle a dead fish to know it's going to stink, and to see that Microsoft has made some perplexingly stupid decisions.

 

Take, for instance, the Zune's highly touted wireless feature. The idea is that the Zune allows you to connect with your friends to trade music and sample new tunes. Microsoft is selling community hard here --the Zune's sales slogan is the enigmatic phrase "Welcome To The Social."

 

But the sharing feature has been crippled to the point of uselessness. If you get a song from a friend you can only listen to it three times, over a period of three days, before it expires. You can't send it to a third friend. And you can't wirelessly connect to your PC or an Internet hot spot.

 

The new Zune Marketplace is even stupider. Microsoft is trying to break open Apple's near monopoly of the music market, so they're launching an online music store that competes with iTunes. The only difference here is that iTunes is simple, elegant, and intuitive. The Zune Marketplace seems like the polar opposite. It has fewer songs. No audiobooks or podcasts. It doesn't sell movies or TV shows. And if you actually want to buy a song, you've got to lay out big chunks of cash and jump through more hoops than a circus lion. Get a load of this passage from Walt Mossberg's Journal review:

 

"To buy even a single 99-cent song from the Zune store, you have to purchase blocks of "points" from Microsoft, in increments of at least $5. You can't just click and have the 99 cents deducted from a credit card, as you can with iTunes. You must first add points to your account, then buy songs with these points. So, even if you are buying only one song, you have to allow Microsoft, one of the world's richest companies, to hold on to at least $4.01 of your money until you buy another. And the point system is deceptive. Songs are priced at 79 points, which some people might think means 79 cents. But 79 points actually cost 99 cents."

 

Don't feel bad if you have to go back and read that a few times before it makes sense --I know I did. Buying music from Microsoft seems awkward, over-complicated, and designed from the bottom up to squeeze every last cent out of the consumer.

 

There's plenty more to complain about. Microsoft's copy protection schemes are too restrictive. The Zune is about 60% bigger and 17% heavier than a iPod. It comes in brown. All considered, we could be looking at the biggest consumer electronics flop in recent history here. This is like "Microsoft Bob," only more embarrassing.

 

[olyclimber]

DRM IZ KEWL!

[G-spotter]

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