Slashdot Mirror
Microsoft leaks Zune Details in FCC filing
cnet-declan writes "One of my colleagues at CNET News.com has picked up on a filing that Microsoft made yesterday with the FCC. Our article reports that Microsoft's Zune media player (the iPod rival discussed before on Slashdot) is going to have features such as creating mobile social networks and streaming music to nearby friends or strangers. It's going to support the 802.11b and 802.11g wireless standards, have a 30GB hard drive, support music, movies, and photos, and have a 3-inch screen. Is this finally enough to unseat Apple?"
Funny, after first reading:
"Microsoft's Zune media player is going to have features such as creating mobile social networks and streaming music to nearby friends or strangers"
I thought, how on earth will MS get away with allowing people to share music with one another, given the way they've bowed to industry pressure regarding HDCP on 32-bit Vista? Then I read the article, which only mentions "promotional copies of songs, albums and playlists,". This is hardly the same thing as unfettered sharing, and seems pretty limiting... practically pointless, IMHO.
There are hundreds of millions of people who commute by train every day around the world..
Who, for the vast majority, never ever utter a single word to their fellow commuters unless they're friends already. It's a sad fact that a universal constant on buses, trains, tubes, and metros the world over is everyone travelling in deathly silence from the moment they board until the moment they alight at their destination.
If Microsoft can make people strike up conversations with the strangers around them they don't deserve a business success with the Zune, they deserve the next 100 Nobel Peace Prizes.
http://twitter.com/onion2k
One consistent trap that people fall into in all areas is "fighting the last war" - thinking of what you would have needed to win in a previous battle that you lost (or what somebody else who lost would have needed to win) and trying to win the next one by providing that, all the while forgetting that the victor is probably not resting on his or her laurels.
That's what Microsoft is doing here. This might have been enough to defeat the Video iPod, but that was the last device. This will - at most - be on par with Apple's new offering, and probably beat by it. It looks like Apple's new iPod will have an even bigger screen than this, by moving the touchpad to the back. That plus WiFi will probably be enough to keep this at bay, not to mention any other extra features Apple might add.
Overall, there is no clear "killer app" that makes me think this will be successful. The Zune looks fully competent, but you need more than competence to defeat a de facto standard. I don't know about you, but the prospect of being able to borrow a song from a friend for a day before it is cancelled provided we are both using Zunes doesn't get me very excited. Nor do I have any desire to beam random files to strangers. The ability to work with social networks might be cool but there are no details on that, and I'm not going to get my hopes up.
There is of course an easier way to defeat a de facto standard - beat them on price. If this were offered for a very low price, for example $150 or $200 for a 30GB model, they would steal a lot of market share from Apple and make up the money with future models once people warmed to their product. That's why companies call them "entry models." But they are charging $300 for this, so there is no monetary reason for anybody to take a "step down" from the iPod, which is the way any non-iPod device is currently perceived, fair or not.
The Windows key is very useful, and the fact that no applications use it is what makes it useful: it allows for a wide variety of windowing system-specific keybindings that won't conflict with application keybindings. That's exactly the way I set up my FVWM bindings, all on mod4, and no matter what crazy-ass bindings my apps use (and it wouldn't be a Unix app if it didn't have crazy-ass bindings) they don't conflict with my crazy-ass bindings because just about no apps use mod4 for shortcuts (a pox on any that do).
Windows differs from my setup (which is clearly perfect) in a few ways. First, it uses alt-tab, whereas I use mod4+tab for consistency (and my keyboard's two meta keys are each bigger than its one alt key anyhow). Second, it brings up the Start menu when you tap the Windows key, which is the part that's pure evil. IMHO modifier keys should strictly be modifier keys. This also goes for alt (compare, say, GTK+'s alt behavior with that of most Win32 programs).
But the overriding point is that Microsoft hardware doesn't really have much to do with the Windows key. Unix vendors and also Apple have had similar keys long before Microsoft introduced theirs (though Apple's key is also the primary key used for app bindings). And IMO its failings have entirely to do with software. If you want to disable it in Windows there's a registry hack to do that, which can be found by searching the wb if you're lucky.