I have a confession to make: I don’t think the Zune is a bad device. Of course I don’t own one, I have an iPod, because it has been crippled by software which makes its most attractive feature, wireless, functionally useless. I also think the department is hobbled by not being sufficiently independent of Microsoft.
I have said that the answer is to break Microsoft up but it is probably too late to save the Zune brand. Enough mistakes have been made to make it a laughing stock which is fatal for a consumer device. That said the underlying concepts are solid and with some more imagination allied to with a little more independence may mean success. And if they learn from their mistakes the Zune marketing money hasn’t been completely wasted either.
Microsoft needs to forget about its competition, look at the market and build something users want. They have done it before with the Xbox, the live service is an excellent service but then they went and spoiled it by lazily slapping the ‘live’ tag on all its other products.
