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

Points to a larger cultural problem at MS

[elrous0]

There is no grand vision and it's got poor leadership, so individual parts of the company have no fucking clue what's going on in other parts of the company. By contrast, this is something that Apple (under Jobs, anyway) has always been MUCH better at.

Sadly, I'm starting to see this problem in Google too. Google seems to be going off in a million different directions lately, with no apparent overarching plan. They seem to be taking a "throw every dart at the board and hope one hits the bullseye" approach (similar to MS). Apple takes more the "throw a small number of darts, but aim them well and throw them hard" approach.

Re:Points to a larger cultural problem at MS

[Hazel Bergeron]

It's true. For all the justified dislike for Apple there is, Jobs has spent the last 30 years being excellent at picking the good ideas at the right time, which explains why they're such a successful and popular brand.

Mind you, MS is still the only one of these big three to have a committed interest in long-term research (the "grand vision" which has kept IBM alive despite a century of changes): Google, for all its PhDs, publishes very little interesting research, and Apple publishes nothing, only occasionally advancing the state of the art where it's been important for implementation.

Re:Points to a larger cultural problem at MS

[Archangel Michael]

That is because, Microsoft, at its heart, is a "Windows (tm)" Company. That is what they do. Apple used to be in the "Macintosh" business, but they realized that they were more than that, and that they are a "technology" company.

Microsoft views everything through that pane of glass and everything is tied to leverage that marketshare. They shoehorn Windows onto Phones and Tablets and it just doesn't work because nobody wants Windows on a phone.

Re:Points to a larger cultural problem at MS

[Grishnakh]

The only problem with this is that their research doesn't seem to have resulted in much in the way of actual products or improvements to products. Sure, they made a pretty cool photography tool recently, and there was Clippy (which everyone hated), but what real groundbreaking improvements to MS products have come out of their research? Windows 7 really isn't that different from Windows 95 (except for the kernel and architecture, which really came from a guy they hired who was the main guy for VMS).

By contrast, we use the products of IBM's research every day. I still remember when IBM developed the copper-on-silicon process back in the 90s, and this was revolutionary. Now, every CPU has it. That's just one of many breakthroughs they've contributed to computing.

Re:Too bad

[Missing.Matter]

Why not still get one? It's still a great piece of hardware. The ecosystem is still supported, and there's no sign they'll be abandoning it any time soon. In fact, they recently expanded the Zune marketplace into Canada.

So what does this mean for the DRM

[Animats]

Microsoft does it again. First they killed PlaysForSure, with its DRM, and now Zune,with its own incompatible DRM.

As I've pointed out before, the lifetime of DRM systems seems to be about five years. At the end of life, users tend to lose content, although sometimes there's a migration path.