First Gen Zune Was A "Compromise"

With all of the talk of the new Zune line, it was intriguing to encounter a story about the original Zune, now better known as the Zune 30.  The folks over at Tech Blorge had the opportunity to interview some Zune higher ups and this is what they found out:

Microsoft’s first media player was met with mediocre praise. It was a decent player, but it stood in the shadow of the iPod. It turns out the second generation Zune is a lot more like the device Microsoft wanted to originally release. Polishing up old features and introducing new ones, many reviewers consider the Zune 80 to be the king of harddrive portable media players, but why didn’t Microsoft release this Zune last year as opposed to its mediocre brother?

It turns out there’s two reasons: politics and ignorance.

The article goes on to discuss how the original Zune was rushed to market, and how they wanted to keep partners pleased.  It also offers some insight into the features offered, and how Microsoft listened to users to incorporate wireless syncing, which is included in the firmware upgrade for the Zune 30.

Overall, the article is pretty critical of the original Zune as Microsoft entered into a new market area.  Clearly they learned quite a bit as the new Zune line definitely can compete with any other players on the market at this point, and the initial reviews are quite favorable.

You can read the whole thing over here.

Comments

[torque1]

i think the zune 3 looks cool but i hope u can conect zune 3 with any phone company that will take out the ipot ha ha

[christina]

i think that zune3 look good .iam just wondering if the zune3 is coming out for t-mobile love because i saw the t-mobile sign on the zune3.