Microsoft Reportedly Ends Zune Hardware Development

ideaz tips this Bloomberg report: "Microsoft Corp. will cease introducing new versions of the Zune music and video-player amid tepid demand, helping the company shift its focus to mobile phones, according to a person familiar with the decision. The company will concentrate on putting Zune software onto mobile phones such as those running Microsoft’s Windows operating system, said the person, who declined to be identified because the decision hasn’t been announced. Zune software lets customers buy songs and movies, as well as pay a monthly fee to stream unlimited music."

Re:Microsoft has been changing

[balls of steel]

It looks like they're really making good progress. Windows 7, XBOX360, Windows Phone 7...All awesome products. It's good, since I really wouldn't want to live in a world dominated by Apple and Google.

I have to say I agree here. Lets see Bing for example. Live search was always worse than Google, but now they're really up to par, sometimes even better. While Google is spammed with all kinds of shitty websites, Bing is clean. Kudos to MS.

I like Zune better than iTunes

[rsilvergun]

At least the UI. It's cleaner and faster, even if you compare it to iTunes on a Mac. They had some nasty music deleting bugs earlier on though, which is great fun when you paid for the tracks instead of having them on CD.

Zunes are durable too, at least 1st Gen. My ugly brown Zune is still going strong, and it was $100 at a time when a 30 gig iPod was $400 :D.

Re:Their key strategic mistake

[bananaquackmoo]

While I realize you're joking they actually made many, many more strategic mistakes. Forcing me to use the Zune software was one. Only having that software on the PC was another. Making that software super slow and super buggy was also quite bad. Rarely updating the firmware and software was the next mistake. Poor codec support was another. Ignoring their customers was probably the worst (one example of that: doing love/hate instead of star ratings). The thing that pissed me off the most (though they later fixed it), as an early adopter, was that their software AUTOMATICALLY and without asking, upon initial install, overwrote all of my music tags, as well as corrupting a good 75% of my music. It's all really too bad, the UI on the hardware was quite good.

What is with the obsession?

[Belial6]

I'm not sure where all this fecal mania at Slashdot comes from. Every time there is a product that is brown, the fecalphiles come out of the woodwork and start claiming that the product looks like poop. It seems to be an obsession around here. Ubuntu did not look like poop. It was brown. It was earth tones. The Zune did not look like poop any more than an iPod looked like a hand full of semen. In other words. Not at all. Unpleasant things come in pretty much every color. Associating every brown product with poop speaks more to the person making the association than it does to the product.

Re:Microsoft has been changing

[Anthony Mouse]

It looks like they're really making good progress. Windows 7, XBOX360, Windows Phone 7...All awesome products.

I kind of feel like Vista really lowered the bar and now people are happy with anything that isn't strictly worse than the previous version. I mean sure, Windows 7 has features that Windows XP doesn't, but most home users use it because it came installed on their PC and most businesses are upgrading to it primarily because they skipped Vista and they don't want to be still running XP when Microsoft discontinues support for it, rather than because it's so awesome that they had to have it.

And look at WP7: About the best you can say about it is that it's an improvement over WP6. But it still seems like a day late and a dollar short compared to its competitors.

It's good, since I really wouldn't want to live in a world dominated by Apple and Google.

I'll take Apple and Google over Microsoft any day. And realistically that seems to be the way things are going -- Android is well-positioned to become the mobile commodity OS with the lion's share of sales volume, especially in the budget market, with iOS securing the position MacOS has always held relative to Windows, i.e. lower volume but higher margins.