Back during Middle Earth, when I was entering Junior High School (now called Middle School) my parents, wanting me to fit in, bought me some “hip” new clothes. Their idea of “hip” meant psychedelic bell-bottom pants adorned with blue-and-silver “amoebas”, a red-white-and-blue long-sleeve button-down shirt, and chukka boots. I looked, in a word, hideous, and the kids at school let me know it. I tried to explain to my good-intentioned parents that “hip” was really a pair of grungy jeans, a tie-dyed t-shirt, and a pair of Converse All-Stars, but they, being parents, prevailed. I wore the outfit maybe twice.

What does all this have to do with technology? Hang with me.

This holiday season, Microsoft will introduce, to great fanfare, the latest in a long line of would-be “iPod killers”. It’s called “Zune”, and will be a major departure from Microsoft’s previous attempts to control the backpack and living room as well as the desktop.

Until now Microsoft has been licensing the Windows Media Audio format (with their own proprietary digital rights management (DRM) scheme) to portable music player makers like Creative and SanDisk under the “Plays for Sure” marketing campaign. To put it mildly, it hasn’t worked.

So, time for a new tactic, but with the same old tried-and-true Microsoft methods. They put the Zune name on what is essentially a re-skinned Toshiba Gigabit player (which, incidentally, isn’t really selling well either). They announce that Zune won’t play music purchased from any of their former “Plays for Sure” partners, like Napster (which is considering Chapter 11) and Rhapsody (which throws anything at the wall to see if it will stick). It will use a completely new DRM scheme, only playing music purchased from Microsoft’s new “Zune Marketplace” online store.

Now here’s where the story about my bell-bottoms comes in. Microsoft, with their tragically un-hip genetic makeup, is trying, probably too hard, to “out-cool” the competition (iPod). They started with an attempt at what’s called “viral marketing”, creating a vague (goofy) website hinting at the Zune’s promise. They’ve built a wireless capability into the Zune so that “Zuners” can transfer songs from one Zune to another, tapping into the whole “community” MySpace/FaceBook craze (they think). There’s one catch. A “shared song” can only be played three times or for three days, whichever comes first, then it becomes just empty bytes until it is purchased. Oh, and although you can share songs that aren’t purchased online (like those ripped from your own CDs), even those songs are subject to the three day/three times rule. Ugh.

Zunes will come in today’s “hot” colors - black and white (now, who else makes black and white players?) - as well as the color everyone’s clamoring for these days – brown. No, that’s not a misprint. Brown. Not even a nice brown. The color of, well, never mind.

There’s only one Zune configuration. Longer and fatter than Apple’s 80 GB iPod offering, Zune sports a small-by-today’s-standards 30 GB hard drive. Although the controls look like the iPod’s click wheel at first glance, they’re actually just buttons. Much will be made of the Zune’s 3-inch diagonal screen (1/2 inch bigger than iPod). However, the Zune’s screen has the same number of pixels (320 x 240) as the iPod’s. Same number of pixels in a bigger area means, of course, a fuzzier picture. So much for that.

Unlike the iTunes Store, Zune users will be able to rent their music (an idea which hasn’t caught on in the marketplace either).

The cost of the Zune? $249. Yawn. Another one bites the dust. Now, if they just built one with blue and silver amoebas...

© 2006 Peter F. Zimowski