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Innovation

Top Ten Things Wrong With Zune

Yeah, we know. Won't work with Microsoft's oh-so-ironically labelled Plays For Sure, won't work with Vista, won't work with the Mac, has really really naff DRM, has wasted its Wi-Fi and requires you to buy a non-convertible currency called Points before you can actually get music.
Written by Rupert Goodwins, Contributor

Yeah, we know. Won't work with Microsoft's oh-so-ironically labelled Plays For Sure, won't work with Vista, won't work with the Mac, has really really naff DRM, has wasted its Wi-Fi and requires you to buy a non-convertible currency called Points before you can actually get music. It's a hideous car-crash of a product.

But those aren't the reasons Zune is doomed to become known as the New Coke of failure in the drinks holder of the Edsel of marketing misfires. Here are ten much better reasons to point and openly mock

10 It wants to be an iPod. Look at it. Fake scroll wheel. Fake iTunes. Fake buzz. Comes in black and white. Five years to come up with something new, and this?

9 . It so fails to be an iPod. It comes in brown. Brown! It's fatter, it's heavier, it looks like a lump of robot poo from a big, fat, heavy robot. Do you want robo-poo in your pocket? From a fat robot? Exactly.

8. ZuneScene are selling it in the States with the tagline "Dude, you're getting a Zune." Not only is this a recycled tagline, it's recycled from Dell - possibly the lowest-rent source of high-tech ideas outside Dixons.

7. Microsoft is selling it in the States with the tagline "Welcome to the Social". My uncle used to go down the Social. It was a frightening place full of coffin-dodgers trying to hide from the Grim Reaper behind a smokescreen of Benson and Hedges. It smelled of at least six things at once, none of them good. The only technology they had was a 78RPM record player and hearing aids with valves in. Is this how Microsoft wants us to think of Zune?

6. Zune 1.5? Two words. Orange. Pink.

5. The accessories are even uglier than the Zune itself. There are these things called Speck cases, which make the Zune look like the sole of a Doc Marten boot, like it's stuffed inside one of those gym shoes with the silly rubber dimples around the toes, or like it's been pushed into a big, big wad of chewing gum and pulled half out. These are bad things. These are embarrasing things. This is the world you'll enter if you buy a Zune, dude.

4 Zune Masters. Microsoft is trying to recruit college kids to go out there and evangelise about the Zune to their friends. Qualify, and you're called a Zune Master. The only good thing about this is that if they try it here, the poor saps will have the robo-poo beaten out of them faster than a first generation iPod drained its batteries. And did Apple ever need an iPod master? Quite.

3 They're not selling it here until 2008. Why should the Americans have all the fun watching Microsoft making a complete arse of itself for more than a year? It's bad enough them keeping the good telly.

2 www.zune.net - the home page. Go on, take a look. Not only did Microsoft fail to get zune.com, but the dot net looks like it was put together by a fourteen year old in 1997 using a 'My first web site' primer from Computer Newbie magazine and Notepad.. And the main graphic looks like a young man straining at stool.

1 If it succeeds, we'll get to see Steve Ballmer jumping around on stage in a tight black poloneck jumper.

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