Trying Out the Zune: IPod It’s Not

As a follow up of my post on Social Music Players and the Microsoft's Zune (read post here), I just read the New York Times' review of Zune. And readers, it's not great news for Microsoft!

Journalist David Pouge writes:

"Microsoft is probably the greenest company in all of high tech. Not green in the environmental sense — green with envy. The Zune comes in white, black or brown and it offers a bigger screen than the iPod’s. It goes on sale on Tuesday. Microsoft is so jealous of the iPod’s success that Tuesday it will unveil a new music system — pocket player, jukebox software and online music store — that’s an unabashed copy of Apple’s. It’s called Zune."

David Pouge also makes an excellent point of the fact that Microsoft could have tapped one important market here: those who would have chosen an iPod competitor just to show their resentment for Apple’s proprietary closed system - they could have introduced a non-DRM based player. But oh no! Instead, they decide to launch ANOTHER system! It was bad enough when there were two incompatible copy-protection standards: iTunes and PlaysForSure [ed: Microsoft's previous attempt at getting at Apple...]. Now there will be three.

David Pouge goes on:
"To make matters worse, you can’t use Windows Media Player to load the Zune with music; you have to install a similar but less powerful Windows program just for the Zune. It’s a ridiculous duplication of effort by Microsoft, and a double learning curve for you. So how is the Zune? It had better be pretty incredible to justify all of this hassle."


And was it?
According to NYTimes, the Zune works well enough, but has fewer features (no scroll wheel for example), is bigger/uglier and less flexibiity (Microsoft does not offer podcasts for example - they could probably not bring themselves to write the word "POD"). In addition, the whole big Zha-Zha-Zuu with the Wi-FI antenna is ludicrous: Why build a social player that can only communicate with other Zunes, and no other devices with Wi-Fi's? Then you can't use the feature before all your friends have a Zune as well! (It's like the first phone: Who are you going to call?) - and the music you beam to people will EXPIRE after 3 days... so what's the point?

NYtimes concludes:
"Competition is good and all. But what, exactly, is the point of the Zune? It seems like an awful lot of duplication — in a bigger, heavier form with fewer features — just to indulge Microsoft’s “we want some o’ that” envy. Wireless sharing is the one big new idea — and if the public seems to respond, Apple could always add that to the iPod.

Then again, this is all standard Microsoft procedure. Version 1.0 of Microsoft Anything is stripped-down and derivative, but it’s followed by several years of slow but relentless refinement and marketing. Already, Microsoft says that new Zune features, models and accessories are in the pipeline.

For now, though, this game is for watching, not playing. It may be quite a while before brown is the new white."

And I can't agree more!

Read the whole article in the New York Times here.