Zune & iPod Get Mixed Results in WSJ Poll

Alright, can anyone tell me what's better than having one side of a "fanboy" war altering results on a poll to show strength in their product? No one? Well the answer is actually two. As you may have all known, or heard about, the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) recently held a voting poll with the question entitled, "Which of these items are you most likely to purchase as a gift?".

As you've probable figured out by now, two of the choices were the Zune and the iPod/iPhone. The ending result of this poll showed that 62% of the voters picked the iPod/iPhone, and the Zune had a surprisingly 28% of the vote. Now wait a minute, Doug Aamoth at CrunchGear states that the Zune, up until that ending day, only had 1% of the votes. So how did this happen exactly?

Apparently an affectionate Zune fan wrote an autovoting script only to be later matched by a similar script from the iPod side of the fence. The result?

When I left my house Thanksgiving morning, the Zune had 241 vote to iPhone/iPods 63,415 votes. Pretty lopsided I must say. Well, someone went and ruined any credibility this poll had by creating an auto voter for the Zune. I won’t share the link since I think it’s embarrasing that someone has so little respect for this poll that they would ruin it by skewing the votes. Basically this auto voter opens up in your browser and begins spamming votes for the Zune.

And it gets better.

Now, 16 hours later, this poll has 169,554 votes. What is even worse is the fact that it would seem that someone also created something similar for the iPhone/iPod seeing that the numbers have jumped from 63,415 votes to 377,766 in the same time period."

Wow. I guess the song "Anything you can do I can do better, I can do anything better than you", really applies to this story. This just shows how crazy some "hardcore" fans can be and do such a thing to change/spam the votes just to make their product-of-choice stand out and be the best. Simply put, I would be alright if Zune only got 1%. I mean I wouldn't be pleased with it, but you've got to take into consideration that there are other choices on that list, and not everyone has heard of the Zune, and most people just go for the iPod. But with the recent zune shortages, it makes my life a lot easier knowing that there are less people who want Zunes, and a better chance I'll be getting a Zune before Christmas.