Zune Fail? No Surprise.

When I woke up this morning, I was greeted by the news that every single 1st-gen 30gb Zune had completely and utterly frozen up. I personally do not own a Zune (or an iPod for that matter) nor do I know anyone who does (makes me wonder who all of these angry Zune users are) but it definitely seems that the Web is aglow about this.

It’s a case of global schadenfreude, not so much at the Zune users, who have a legitimate reason for being very upset, but at Microsoft. After all, they made the player and it appears that it was a software issue that caused it to fail. Considering all Microsoft does is write software, the fact that they shipped a product with such a lethal bug speaks very lowly to the company.

But what did anyone expect? From day one the Zune was an iPod rip off released by a software company with an inferior record of security and stability than Apple. This is highlighted by the fact that Apple charges 2 times more for their computers than a similar Windows machine, but people are still snatching them up.

One has to wonder what those who bought the Zune were thinking at the time. It’s price and functionality were almost identical to the iPod, the latter being battle-tested and generally well-regarded. There were no new features that really made worth buying, no serious cost cuts and nothing to be gained (unless you got a great deal).

The Zune was, and pretty much still is, an attempt to compete with the iPod without doing anything better than it. The problem is that, when you’re entering a cornered market, it isn’t good enough to be equal to your competitor, you need to be better, faster and cheaper.

Sadly, Microsoft couldn’t do any of those things. In fact, it couldn’t even make the blasted thing work for four years. Read more