The gist of their origin seems to be that Microsoft has been making the rounds to various “partners” - which in this case means the entertainment industry and iPod peripheral makers - to line up content and peripheral support for the Zune, and that it’s these “partners who’ve been briefed by Microsoft” who are leaking the details. Q: The “leaks” about Zune strike me as rather comically transparent. Q: And so now that Microsoft is abandoning the licensing model (or at least deprecating it) in favor of a closed model that they completely control, will all those pundits who’ve been predicting doom for the iPod for the last four years declare that Microsoft, like Apple, is now making the same mistake with Zune that Apple made with the Macintosh in the 1980s? Q: Isn’t that like inviting guests to your home for dinner and serving them hot dogs while you yourself eat a steak? Q: But yet Engadget reports, “Microsoft will continue to support and develop for their PlaysForSure initiative, but all things PlaysForSure are handled by entirely separate division that will not have any crossover.” Is that not the epitome of metastatic corporate bureaucracy? One division within Microsoft spending $100 million or more to launch their own closed media player system another division charged with lining up “partners” for the PlaysForSure platform that Microsoft’s own media player division deems not good enough. I’ll bet that’s just delightful news to all of Microsoft’s “PlaysForSure” partners like Creative Labs and Napster. Q: According to Engadget, the Zune service and devices won’t just be separate from Microsoft’s PlaysForSure platform, they’ll be wholly incompatible with each other. Q: Speaking of logos, what about the Zune logotype that’s going around? With the magenta-to-orange gradient and weird overly-complicated Necker-cube-ish Z-shape mark? That’s just temporary, right? But that “ Microsoft Designs the iPod Package” video be damned, you just know there are executives at Microsoft dying to slap a logo on the front of this thing, right? The scroll wheel, the sparsity of buttons, the plain white facade. Q: I mean, if this is even vaguely the form factor of the device they plan to ship, it’s so shameless a rip-off that they might as well have called it the “xPod” or even the “Ipod” ( “It’s a totally different name - we have a capital ‘I’, see!”). Q: Have you seen the photo of the first Zune gadget “leaked” to Engadget? Seems, uh, a bit familiar, too, what with the white plastic and scroll wheel:
#8 ball answers portable#
It’s a “music and entertainment” project that will involve portable players, an online media store, and desktop software for managing media and getting content from the store onto the players all of it integrated and all of it produced and sold exclusively by Microsoft themselves. Q: So Microsoft has confirmed that Zune, the “iPod/iTunes killer” project that Engadget has been reporting on for a few weeks, is for real. Magic 8-Ball Answers Your Questions Regarding Microsoft’s ‘Zune’ Tuesday, 25 July 2006