Geekfoolery

First, despite Microsoft’s claim to have sold more than a million Zunes, a figure that’s worth about 10% of the hard-drive based player market, I have never, ever seen a single person using one in public. I began Zunewatch on Jan 1st to see if it would be worthwhile for me to get a Zune to use their signature wireless music sharing feature. My thought was that if I could go up to strangers and say, “Hey, check out this song” and transfer it to them by wifi (aka “squirting”), well, that would be a something I could not do with my iPod.

Well, never saw one. Now it’s time for Zune 2.0. There’s 3 models now, an 80 gig hard drive model, and 4 and 8 gig flash models. You can now sync your Zune with the wifi, and the music sharing function is slightly less stupid than it was–it used to be song you sent to a friend, even one you created yourself, would be good for 3 plays or 3 days. Now your friend can keep it as long as he wants, but he still only gets 3 plays.

The design, from what I can see, is slightly less… ugly? The Zune software reportedly is cleaner than it used to be.

And, um, (YAWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWN)…  the….. the, ummm, the thing that everyone hated is different, and … there’s a pad thingy called the Zune pad, and…

I’m sorry, this review is sapping my will to live. I mean really, people, Zune 1 has been the butt of jokes since launch, and Microsoft has had a year to fix it, and they’ve smoothed it out, but at the end of the day, it’s underwhelming. If this had been the product Microsoft had released last year, the only difference might have been that slightly fewer people would have heaped derision on it.

The story has always been that it takes Microsoft 3 tries to get it right, and then look out. Well, that was the case with Office, anyway. The problem for Microsoft is that the music industry and portable music player market isn’t sitting still.

The first major shots to be fired are Apple and Amazon getting into the business of selling songs without digital right management software, or DRM. Zune 1.0 had the whole 3 days/3 plays nonsense on shared songs, as well as cryptic policies on what the DRM conditions were for songs in the Zune marketplace, and to round out the fiasco, Zune was incompatible with the Microsoft Plays for Sure DRM scheme. To its credit, the Zune Marketplace now reportedly contains a million DRM-free songs in MP3 format. But whereas Apple’s iTunes software is common enough and prevalent enough for people to use it even if they don’t own an iPod, and hundreds of people have a history of shopping with Amazon, I think Zune Marketplace is bringing DRM free music to the market too late for it be a differentiator.

But while selling DRM free tracks may not help Zune, it could help Apple, Amazon, and others. Steve Jobs is on record as saying he would love to sell all music on iTunes without copy protection. Having Zune join that cause puts Microsoft in the camp of digital music retailers in opposition to the traditional record companies.

The second development that makes Zune 2.0 seem almost retro is the iPhone. Love it or hate it, the iPhone has reset the bar for interface and usability on mobile devices. “Convergence”–the merging of our multiple electronic gadgets into one, combining cell phones, PDAs, and music players–has been stalled on the music players. Phones have had music capabilities for years, but few people use them for the same reason that for many years, people’s VCRs blinked 12:00 at them. The interfaces sucked. The iPhone makes it possible to have a phone that is also an iPod.

Finally, there is the iPod touch. Retaining the iPhone interface, the iPod touch does something with its wifi that promises a revolution. iPhone and iPod touch include wife web browsing with Safari in a manner that makes mobile browsing enjoyable for th first time. This is revolutionary–it practically turns the iPhone/iPod touch into a laptop replacement. If Zune had used its wifi for this in version 1.0, they would have had something.

So there it is. Another Zune. Through brute force and sheer bloodymindedness, they’ll sell a few of these, and they’ll form a few more legions of focus groups and committees and there will no doubt be a Zune 3, and probably 4 and 5. Bill Gates remarked at the unveiling that Microsoft is “committed to this space.”

That, in a nutshell, is the problem, I suppose. In the past, upon hearing that Bill was “committed to the space.” What that means is that Microsoft has become the Buick station wagon of music players. “Buy the Zune,” Bill says, “because we’re reliable, and we’ll be here for a long time.” That used to sell cars… to my dad. And that space Bill Gates is committed to is a parking  space.

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