Zune Dead, Then Not Dead, Then Officially Dead

UnknowingFool writes "On Monday Microsoft updated webpages to announce a price drop for the Zune pass subscription, and it removed all references to the Zune hardware. This prompted many to suspect the Zune was dead. A MS spokesman then tweeted that the updates were in error and the Zune was not dead. Then MS later admitted that they will no longer produce hardware but would honor any existing orders. It appears MS has trouble with managing their PR."

Comments

Re:Points to a larger cultural problem at MS

[Anonymous Coward]

For realz. see http://research.microsoft.com/apps/dp/pu/publications.aspx

Yes, it's a fully funded research division that publishes papers on OS, functional programming and other CS topics. No, they don't have a PR wing that posts frontpage to news aggregators every week.

Re:Points to a larger cultural problem at MS

[egamma]

MS is still the only one of these big three to have a committed interest in long-term research

MS does research? For real? I thought all they did was buy startups and competitors, some of which had done research in the past, or are winding down R+D after the purchase.

Please don't confuse research grants from the bill gates charitable foundation with "MS does long term research".

Why not visit Microsoft Research and see for yourself?

Also check out the Microsoft Garage

You may not like Microsoft but it's hard to deny that they do more research than, say, Symantec or Dell.

Re:Points to a larger cultural problem at MS

[macs4all]

No. Microsoft development doesn't pay attention to Research very much. Too much management fubar.

But Kinect (an actually impressive innovation, if useless) did come from Research.

Um, Kinect came from an outside company.

The "Kinect" technology was actually offered to Apple first; but the third party company (can't remember the name) turned it down, saying that Apple had too many "conditions" in their offer.