Tim Lee

Square Wheel

Another scathing Zune review, this one in the Chicao Sun-Times:

“Avoid,” is my general message. The Zune is a square wheel, a product that’s so absurd and so obviously immune to success that it evokes something akin to a sense of pity.

The setup process stands among the very worst experiences I’ve ever had with digital music players. The installer app failed, and an hour into the ordeal, I found myself asking my office goldfish, “Has it really come to this? Am I really about to manually create and install a .dll file?”

But there it was, right on the Zune’s tech support page. Is this really what parents want to be doing at 4 a.m. on Christmas morning?

That might not be Zune’s fault. After about a year of operation, it’s almost as if a Windows machine develops some sort of antibodies that prevent it from recognizing new hardware. But what’s Microsoft’s excuse for everything else?

Only the Zune software can sync music, video and pictures onto the device; Zune is incompatible with Windows Media Player, the familiar hub of the Windows desktop media experience.

The Zune app doesn’t even have as many features as WMP. And why (for the love of God) doesn’t it support podcasts? That’s pure insanity.

It’s incompatible with Microsoft’s own PlaysForSure standard, too.

You’ll have to buy all-new content from the new Zune Marketplace.

Oh, and the Zune Marketplace doesn’t even take real money, proving that on the Zune Planet there’s no operation so simple that it can’t be turned into a confusing ordeal. The Marketplace only accepts Zune Points, with an individual track typically costing the equivalent of the iTunes-standard 99 cents.

As I’ve said before, when you’re the challenger, you’ve got to bend over backwards to meet your users’ needs. Instead, Microsoft is acting like a smug incumbent. And it looks like their product is going to bomb because of it.

November 27, 2006 | Comments |

Viewing 2 Comments

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    What's particularly sad is that, because of the iTunes DRM and conservative featureset, there really is plenty of room available for a bold company to give customers things they want but can't have, even without much genuine innovation. And it's not like MS doesn't have cash to fight lawsuits if need be. Ah, well.
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    I would argue that the iPod's conservative feature set is part of what makes it successful, because that helps make the device idiot-proof to use. It's hard for many people in the geek culture to understand that many, many "normal people" want simplicity, not more features. Sometimes, it's "genuine innovation" to remove features and make something easier to use.

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