The Zune thing, based on the most paranoid DRM scheme imaginable (payoff to the record labels) and burdened with a thousand tie-in schemes (MSFT lock-in as marketing ga-ga) is about as customer hostile as a car with no breaks that ignites randomly and runs on overpriced, watered-down gas sold by one company - which I guess is a fair analogy to Microsoft Windows.
Sure, great, yeah, they're on track to sell a million by next summer. Microsoft can loan money to orphanages in Africa to buy Zunes and get a million 'sold' by the middle of next year.
What does that do to the fact that most all the reviews for Zune on Amazon (not written by MSFT employees) say the device is the most calamitously malformed consumer electronics product ever assembled? How does that address the fact that every reviewer not directly employed or paid by Microsoft (there's a story to be written about MSFT's astroturfing sites) regards the Zune as a bundle of pathetic attempts to abuse the customer for every last dime and place them more in the thrall of the big media companies than even the old record labels could have ever imagined in their most diabolical dreams?
MSFT won the operating system market by manipulating the manufacturers and getting them to agree to preferentially treat Windows - (the boot loader issue that many old technologists asked Justice to investigate as the most potent and egregious restraint-of-trade behavior exhibited by MSFT and its unindicted coconspirators) - as the default operating system on most all assembled and shippped PCs. (Justice went for the simpler tale - Netscape, the abused billionaire's toy, was supposedly locked out of the Windows desktop. Sniff. It was so horrible, Judge Jackson. . . so very howwible how they, they bwoke my bwowser, boo-hoo, boo-hoo.)
Culturally, MSFT disdains of actual end users. They are completely beside the point in MSFT's universe. The PC ships with our stuff on it and they have to use it, end of story. Let one tell the boss they want to run Berkeley Unix. Good luck, clownface.
What MSFT will be left doing is throwing more royalties and levy payments to the labels in order to give them the precedents they need to attack Apple for the same fees and break Apple's business model. Again, the user, the technology and the experience are completely out of the picture. MSFT figures once they can bankrupt Apple's business model, they can shovel anything into the void, absorb the losses for years and drive Apple out of the business. The dev people and lawyers in Redmond are no doubt laughing themselves sick all over their Porches for dreaming up this scheme. . .
Predictable.
But Microsoft can't force the labels and consumer electronics companies to both accept a technology suite that bottlenecks the hardware and the distribution of content through MSFT technologies the way that the they managed with the operating systems they license to the manufacturers and, oh yeah, the end users.
Consumers can and do go to a lot of different sources for music and there is little that MSFT can do to change that in the downloadable music space except by buying Apple, Real, MP3.com, Emusic, Napster, Buymusic, AudioLunchbox and eClassical. Even if Justice let them buy a new monopoly they'd still be left to deal with the consumer electronics manufacturers who (like Sony and Philips) have their feet in both hardware and content camps and, of course, the record labels, probably the only industry on earth that can claim to have more diabolically ruthless characters than MSFT.
MSFT wins by creating chokepoints and exploiting them to control markets. The downloadable music scene is just too slippery an environment for MSFT to get a foothold and it's populated by monsters that would make the creature in the Alien movies look like Sister Bertrille.
MSFT, however, will not be able to game the labels they way they ultimately screwed over the PC manufacturers (who now complain all profit in the PC goes to MSFT) smaller companies they 'partnered' with (Latest victims: PlaysForSure partners. PlaysForSure? Wow, the lawyers must have lost another expensive lunch after coming up with that name, knowing they'd abandon it - 'Duh! Don'tPlayNow!' - when they were ready to roll their own player) and the competitors (Digital Research, Lotus Development) that they attacked with market-distorting tactics. (The IBM case - which included Lotus products IBM acquired in the claims - was settled last year.)
MSFT enjoys their badboy reputation because the company is chockablock with hyper-entitled, imagination-free, chair-throwing screaming child men like Ballmer but not in their most caffeine fueled, post-hoops hallucinatory fugue have they ever imagined the kind of monster they are playing with now. The labels will simply decapitate MSFT with endless demands for increasing piracy-levy payments and, finally, punitively expensive litigation if MSFT gives them the opportunity.
After all, the media industry is really one big litigation strategy masquerading as a business model. Before it's all over, it will look like The Flying Nun meets Alien and I know who Sister Betrille is in this analogy.
Couldn't have happened to nicer guys.
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