The Sad Tale of Microsoft Zune

Apple had started off with a few computer models named after the company itself, you know, the Apple and the Apple two, and then Apple two E and so on and so forth. Microsoft when a different route. Microsoft gained rights to various pieces of software. It developed some, but it essentially bought or from a certain point of view, maybe not stole, but it definitely hoodwinked some developers and ended up licensing out operating system software and things like that.

So two very different approaches. So by the mid nineteen eighties, the struggle between Apple and Microsoft had intensified. Apple introduced the Macintosh computer with a graphical user interface or GUI GUY. In other words, Microsoft introduced Windows, its own Guy operating system, and while Microsoft wasn't making the hardware, the term Windows PC became shorthand it was almost as if Microsoft had been making the PCs itself. It wasn't it was just

making the operating system on top of the PC. But then the operating system was in many ways more important than whomever made the machine itself, because the operating system would determine what kind of software you could run on the machine after all. Now, during the eighties and through the nineties, Apple was on the ropes for a lot of different reasons, which I've covered in other episodes of

Tech Stuff. At one point, Apple co founder Steve Jobs left the company, with some versions of the story saying he was essentially fired. Other versions say he was just strongly encouraged to leave. Apple hit some really really rough waters and at one point it was in danger of going out of business. Then Apple actually brought Steve Jobs back kind of to act as a type of advisor. But it wasn't too long before Jobs regained control of the company he had co founded. That's also a very

dramatic story. After that, Apple made a series of moves that would really turn things around for the company and set it on its path to become a trillion dollar company. Now, the interesting thing is, while Windows would retain a dominant hold on the business and home computer operating system markets. Apple would find new ways to become the company associated

with entire technologies, and Apple wasn't inventing these technologies. Instead, the company was designing appealing products and then marketing the heck out of them. And one product that really helped turn Apple around was the iPod, Apple's digital music player, so a standalone device on which you would store and play music. Now, again, Apple did not invent the MP three player. It was not the first company to make one.

They just made one that looked really nice, It worked well, it had some really cool features, and it really benefited from the power of Steve Jobs's presentation at various marketing events, and Apple was able to forge some alliance with various music labels over the next couple of years, and that helped create new opportunities, including the launch of the iTunes

store in two thousand and three. So iTunes had been around before that, but iTunes first started out as software you would have on your computer and you would use iTunes to organize your music library, but you couldn't actually buy music from iTunes at first. Instead, you would buy a CD, a compact disc, put that in the optical drive of your Mac computer. And you would rip music

from the CD and store it digitally within iTunes. That would be your organization software essentially, and that's how you would transfer music over to your iPod too. You would physically connect your iPod to your Mac and then you would port music over from your library on your Mac

computer to your iPod. Now, with two years of negotiation, Steve Jobs was actually able to convince music labels to offer up digital tracks for individual purchase within iTunes itself, and that was the creation of the iTunes store, where instead of using it as just your means of organizing your music, it also became the way you could purchase new music. That would really push Apple to new heights. Microsoft was way behind on the MP three player space.

They did not jump into that market early on, and Apple was able to essentially define that market. Microsoft eventually recognized that there was money to be made in the digital media player space, and the iPod had been out for several years, like five years, and then Microsoft decided they were going to try and create their own digital music player. Maybe this one could have some really innovative

features that would set it apart. Designers could actually take the opportunity to learn about what worked with the iPod and what didn't work, or what people wish the iPod could do. They could take that information and use that to design a superior digital media player. They could have done that. They didn't succeed in doing that. They tried in some ways, but really it was a massive failure, and it's a shame because Apple's incredible success put aside.

There were people who had notes, not musical notes, but like critical notes for the iPod. For example, for folks like myself, I did not own a mac computer. Now, initially, if you wanted an iPod, it would only work with Mac computers. You had to have a Macintosh in order to synchronize with an iPod. It did not work with Windows based machines. Later generations of the iPod and later generations of iTunes would change that, but initially you just

couldn't do it. And if you did want to use a Windows based machine with an iPod that was compatible, you had to download iTunes. You had to install iTunes onto your Windows machine, and the Windows version of iTunes stunk, or, at least in my opinionion it stunk. iTunes could do some stuff that was legitimately useful. You know, it could detect when new tracks were added to your library, and then transferred just those new tracks to your iPod when

you next connected your iPod to your computer. But at least on PC's, iTunes was very slow. It was clunky, It took up a ton of space on your computer, and it required a lot of your computer's assets to run, so everything else slowed to a crawl. It seemed like it was working great on Mac computers whenever I saw people in our interface with it, but my own experience was totally different. I hated iTunes on Windows. I thought

of it as bloatwear or worse. And you couldn't interface with the iPod using any other kind of digital media organizational software. It had to be iTunes. So this meant that Microsoft actually had an opportunity to perhaps design a player and a software package that would work more smoothly for people who were Windows owners rather than Mac owners. That was a real opportunity for them. But even with a really good product, Microsoft still would have faced a

truly tough challenge. Apple had really defined the MP three player landscape for five years. At that point, they had introduced an iPod capable of showing video. It had really great reviews. They had models that could hold up to like eighty gigs of material. It could be a storage product, so you could actually store files on your iPod, not just media files, but other types as well. There are a lot of reasons why the iPod was seen as

a great product. I mean, heck, the iPod is why we call podcasts podcasts like we call it podcasts because Apple created this product that defined an entire generation of technology, so that brand was really entrenched in the minds of consumers. So even with a spectacular product, Microsoft was going to face uphill battle. But it wasn't a spectacular product, so

the battle was even harder. The very first Microsoft Zoon was originally just called the Zoon, but later on Microsoft called it the Zoon thirty, and the thirty in this case references the amount of storage available on the device. It had a thirty gigabyte hard drive. A company called Freescale made the processor that ran in the Zoom thirty.

It also made the processor for another digital player called the Tashiba Gigabeat S. In fact, the Zoon resembled the Tashiba Gigabeat S in many many ways, like it almost was as if the Zoon was essentially a Gigabeit s from Tashiba that had gone through a little bit of a redesign that changed the dimensions of the player and maybe some some aesthetics, but otherwise it looked like it was very similar to the Gigabeat s. And that's because

that's what it happened. Microsoft didn't really build the Zoon to Shiba did. Microsoft made some changes to the design, but they were mostly cosmetic in nature. So Freescale used to be a division within Motorola until two thousand and four when Motorola divested the division and it became Freescale. In twenty fifteen, Freescale would become absorbed into a company

called NXP Semiconductors. So the Zoom came out in a brief span of time where Freescale was its own company, And unfortunately, someone made a booboo with the drivers for the Freescale processors that went into both the Zoom thirty and the Gigabeat s. It was a booboo that wouldn't become noticeable for a couple of years, which is foreshadowing. We'll talk about it when we get there. Okay, before we go any further. Let's take a quick break. Okay,

we're back. So when the Zoon thirty launched, initially you could get it in one of three colors. There was like a pearl white, there was black, and there was brown. I have no idea what made Microsoft think that brown would be a sought after color for an MP three player. I don't know how they didn't anticipate that this was going to create a whole bunch of jokes about the nature of that MP three player. It's like they were

setting themselves up to be hazed. Surely someone at Microsoft at some point said, guys, this might not be a good idea, and yet they went with it. So the original Zoon had a three inch screen and a four x three aspect ratio, so taller than it was wide. This was a much larger screen than what you could find on the iPod at the time. That was really impressive, right,

Like it was a bigger device than the iPod. It was definitely thicker too, Like it was a chonky boy, as they might say, And it was gonna be a hefty piece of plastic that you were gonna hold in your pocket if you're going to walk around with one of these things. But the screen was very large, which was impressive. The UI was pretty nice too, at least

on a surface level. It did turn out that the resolution of that larger screen was actually the exact same resolution as the smaller iPod screen, which means that images shown on the iPod would appear sharper than those that you would see on the Zoon because you had the exact same resolution, but the Zoon had a larger screen, so same resolution, but an in large screen means that

the images on that screen are blurrier. It could play video, but it was kind of immaterial because you couldn't just use video from any source, and the Zoom marketplace didn't have video on it, so you couldn't purchase video to play on it. It could technically support it, but there wasn't really any way to get video onto it, at least initially. It ran a custom version of Microsoft's Portable

Media Center software. The user interface, the actual controls, well, it had a circular dpad like It didn't look like a dpad. It looked like a click wheel like if you think of the old iPods, they had a mechanical wheel where you would put your thumb on this wheel, and you would spin the wheel in order to navigate through the menus. That's what this thing looked like. It had.

It looked like a very similar control mechanism, but no, it was just a dpad in the form of a circle, and then in the center of the circle was a button that you could use to select stuff. So, like a dpad on a game controller, you would push up, down, left, or right to navigate through menus and then use that center button to make a selection. So, uh, kind of a bummer because it looked like the control was meant to be more tactile and touch based, and it's not.

It was just a dpad. The Zoom did have a couple of neat features, however, it had Wi Fi capability. The Zoon thirty had Wi Fi sort of, so you could use the Zoon's Wi Fi to connect with another Zoon that was in the same local space that you were in, like the same room or whatever, and then the two Zoon owners could share songs and even photos between the two different Zoon devices. So if you had a photo on your device, which by the way, there's no camera on the Zoon, so you had to have

loaded this photo on from your computer. Or maybe you have a music track you really liked and you wanted to share it with your buddy who also happens to have a Zoon. You could use this method and send that music file over to your buddy. But if you wanted to purchase a song and put it on your Zoom, you couldn't do it wirelessly. You still had to do the old tethered connection. You'd purchase the song through the

Zoom marketplace on your computer. You would tether your Zoom to the computer and then transfer the music that way. Now let's say you did somehow find the other person in your town who also owned a Zoom, and the two of you decided that you wanted to exchange a song.

You could do that. If you were close enough to them, you could send them a track, but they would have just three days to access that track, and they can play it a maximum of three times and then it would just delete itself off their device, So after three days or after three plays, that song would disappear. They called this feature, and I can't believe it to this day that they did this. This is like the Brown Zoon decision. They called this feature squirting. So you would

squirt a music track to another Zoom user. And I know it sounds like I'm making a joke, I am not. An actual company created a brown MP three player that could squirt music at other MP three players, and yes, everybody made fun of this. For ages, you couldn't listen to a tech podcast, you couldn't read an article without some commentary on the topic of squirting. This was the extent of the Zoom thirties Wi Fi capabilities. Was just sending these files a short distance to another Zoon. That

was it. And like Apple, Microsoft went with a proprietary cable when it came to connecting to the zooon to charge it or to transfer to the Zoon did have one other thing that I thought was pretty cool. It had an FM radio built into it, and I thought that was kind of neat. So like Microsoft was trying to position this as it's a music device, not just

for digital files but also to access radio. But Microsoft didn't really learn a whole lot about what people disliked about the iPod because they made several of the same choices. So one of the big drawbacks of the original Zoon was that it would only work with files that had a certain kind of DRM attached to them. DRM stands for Digital Rights Management, and the whole purpose of DRM is to prevent people from being able to pirate stuff,

to steal things, or to download stuff without permission. But even DRM that Microsoft itself had designed before the Zoon came out wouldn't work on the Zoon itself. It wasn't backwards compatible with Microsoft's own DRM history, and that's because Microsoft introduced a new kind of DRM around the same time that they launched the Zoom, and the Zoom would

only be compatible with that version forward. And that meant that if you happened to already have a bunch of music tracks that had the earlier version of Microsoft's DRM on them, they would not work with your Zoom. So this was very discouraging, right if you already had a sizeable digital library and you were just excited about getting a player where you could put the library on the player, it would be very upsetting to find out, Oh, you can't,

because that has the wrong DRM on it. Like in the history of technology, DRM I think has long proven to be more of a frustration for legitimate users than it has been a deterrent for piracy pirates. Figure out ways around DRM, which means DRM ultimately just becomes a frustrating experience for people who legitimately purchased the item. So DRM is bad, is what I'm saying. Like it doesn't do what it's supposed to do, and then it does do stuff it's not supposed to do. That's the definition

of a bad product. Anyway. Microsoft also did something supremely stupid in my opinion, that it had previously done with its Xbox Marketplace, which is, instead of having Zoom users buy tracks with you know, real money, you first had to go through this process of purchasing Microsoft points and then using the Microsoft points to get tracks so you would redeem points for tracks. So there was this middle

step that was really frustrating. Part of this was to obfuscate how expensive a track was, right because they didn't have a dollar amount associated with it, just a number of points, and you would have to do the math in your head to figure out, okay, well, how many points is equivalent to a dollar, right, But you never could buy them in increments of a dollar. It would

always be like five dollars or more. So that also meant that if all you wanted to do was buy one track, you actually had to spend five bucks to do it, not a dollar, but five dollars just to get the points, and then you would end up with this bank of Microsoft points just sitting in your account doing nothing. So this Microsoft was not the only company to ever do this. I mean Disney did this at

their parks. They had something called Disney dollars, and they were encouraging people to spend their real money to buy theme park currency, where you couldn't use that currency anywhere else but inside those theme parks. Knowing that at least some of your money was just going to be wasted

on this currency. You wouldn't be able to redeem all of it, so you would actually spend more money at the parks, but you wouldn't get value out of all the money you spent because some of it would just be caught up in this fake currency and you don't have enough of it to do anything useful. Microsoft Points were the same way. Ultimately, Microsoft would back off of the system on the Xbox marketplace, but they were still going strong with it when the Zoon launched. Okay, we're

going to take another quick break. I've got some more things to say about the Zoo before we wrap up. All right, we're back. I'm not done slagging off on the Zoon yet. Unlike the original iPod, the Zoon could not be used as a storage device for other files. Right. Like I had mentioned that that was one of the things you could use an iPod for. You could store files on it, you could use it like an external hard drive. You could not do that with the Zooon.

It also didn't support lossless file formats like wave files or wave files if you preferred WAV. Lossless means that when you create that digital file, you haven't lost any of the information contained within that file. So when you convert music into a digital file, a lossless form factor means everything that was in that recording is there. Blossy means that the process of making that file will actually

eliminate some information. Ideally, it's information that wouldn't affect your experience listening to the audio file, but the quality typically takes a hit, whereas lossless, y're getting the highest quality possible based upon whatever recording procedure was used. So reviews said that Zoon's playback quality was good despite the lack of support for lossless audio, but it also said like album art despite being shown on a larger screen than

the iPod didn't look very good. And again it's because of those resolution issues. So Microsoft pushes out the first Zoon in two thousand and six. That's unfortunate wording. I probably should have said something else. Anyway, that year to two thousand and six, Apple sold nearly thirty nine and

a half million iPods. Now that was impressive because up until two thousand and six, collectively, across every single generation of iPod, Apple had sold around forty million units, and in two thousand and six they sold nearly as many just in that one year. So in other words, like in one year, they doubled the number of iPods they had sold throughout the history of the product. So Apple really was in the dominant position for the digital media player space. So how did the Zoom do well the

first couple of weeks? It did okay. Initially sales were slow, but CNN reported at the end of the second week that had moved into the number two spot for digital media players. That does kind of ignore the fact that the number one spot was light years ahead of it, Like it wasn't even close, And being one and two doesn't mean so much. If if number one is like fifty miles ahead of you in a foot race. Microsoft, in a rush to try and make up for five years of lost time, had launched a bit of a flop.

It was received fairly well critically. The critics didn't hate it. They did point out some of the downsides and the ways that the Zoon failed to live up to the standard of the iPod, as well as some of the things that were really interesting that Microsoft had done. But there were a lot of things to criticize. So Microsoft gets back to work and gets to work on the

second generation of the Zoon. This generation would actually ditch that circular dpad and instead use a touch sensitive little surface. It was a quasi square, and I say quasi because it had rounded corners. It didn't have actual angular corners, but it was a surface where you could use touch commands to navigate through the UI, so different from a dpad. It also had some features that I think were pretty neat.

Like say that you were listening to your FM radio on your Zoom and let's say a new song comes on and you really dig it, You've never heard it before, you really dig this song. You could actually flag the song on your Zoom and then when you connected to your Zoom to your computer, you could find that song in the Zoom marketplace and then purchase it. It made song discovery really interesting. I thought that legitimately was awesome.

You can also download some games to the device. The user interface and the screen resolution were both improved with the second generation. But this generation of the Zoom launched in two thousand and seven. Two thousand and seven was also the year that Apple launched a pair of devices that ensured it would continue to dominate the mobile space. The first was the iPhone, and ultimately the iPhone would lead the way to the decline of standalone digital media

players in general, including Apple's own media players. The other device was the iPod Touch, which was like an iPhone without the phone part. And when you stack the iPhone, or rather the iPod Touch against the second generation Zoon, there was just no comparison, Like the iPod Touch was like a sexy Lamborghini and the second generation Zoon was

like a decent car. And you have to remember Apple still dominated the iTunes space, like almost all downloads of purchase music were through iTunes, so Apple had just this almost a monopoly like hold on the whole ecosystem of digital music at this point. Now we're also chronologically getting to the point where another problem with the original zoon

cropped up. I had hinted at it before with the foreshadowing comment, So you remember I said someone at Freescale made a booboo when designing the driver for the processor that was found both in the Zoom thirty and the Tashiba gigabeat s. Well, that booboo failed to account for the fact that two thousand and eight was a leap year. So at midnight Pacific Standard time on December thirty first, two thousand and eight, as the West coast of the United States prepared to ring in the new year, Zoom

thirties stopped working. They froze. The gigabeat s devices out there also froze. They were frozen or bricked, at least temporarily, and it took a little bit for folks to figure out what had happened. And it was again because of the failure to account for a leap year. It saw that there were three hundred and sixty six days in the year, and it didn't know what to do, and it got caught in a kind of loop that meant that the device was frozen. Now, the fix was actually

pretty simple. All users had to do was keep their frozen Zoom thirties and as well as you know, Gigabeat's on and just let the battery drain completely. Once the battery was completely drained, they would just hold off on recharging their device until it was after noon on January first of two thousand and nine. Once that time had passed, they could charge it back up and the device would reset and it would work again. But this was another

embarrassing misstep for the original Zoom. Microsoft did take one more swing with the third generation of the Zoo in two thousand and nine. This would be the Zoon HD. It was an answer to Apple's iPod Touch. So, like the iPod Touch, it had a display that was a touch display. It got rid of all the little physical buttons and stuff for you to navigate through. Everything was touch oriented. And the problem was the Zoon HD came

out in two thousand and nine. The iPod Touch had come out in two thousand and seven, so again Apple had had a couple of years had start, Plus there were some other things going on now. The Zoo HD introduced some cool features like wireless synchronization as well as wireless web access, so you could use it as a wireless mobile device, but you could do that with the

iPod Touch as well. And at this time the writing was starting to show up on the wall for the standalone media playing device, whether it was a Zoom or an iPod or anything else, because people were starting to use their smartphones to play media instead of having a standalone device dedicated to it. Why would you carry two devices around if one can do the trick. So consumer opinions were starting to shift toward accepting streaming as a music delivery service. So early on people were not really

keen on the idea of streaming. They wanted to be able to own the tracks they loved and not rely on a service to continue to offer the tracks they loved in perpetuity, which you know these days when you look at different streaming platforms, specifically like streaming video platforms, you see cases where a platform loses the rights to a particular type of media and then you can't access it anymore on that platform. That's a real problem, right.

It's a problem that you avoid if you purchase the media and you have it in a format that you can still access no matter what happens to the platform. That's different, and that's what people really were worried about back in when they were, you know, buying digital tracks rather than streaming. But eventually streaming went out and it

became a more acceptable delivery system. Apple was still miles ahead at this point, so Microsoft decided to call it quits in twenty eleven, having never made a huge debt in the market, so the Zoom launched in two thousand and six, Microsoft discontinued it five years later. So Zoom launched five years too late and only lasted five years. This would not be the only time Microsoft would have to admit defeat in the hardware space, but we'll talk

about the Windows Phone debacle another day. Today, the Zoon is remembered primarily as a joke. In fact, it was used as a joke in the Guardians of the Galaxy movies. The product itself wasn't necessarily bad. It was just introduced far too late and without the features needed to set it apart from the standard defining iPod. But I think we can all agree the marketing around it was truly terrible, and that is the down and dirty story of the Zoom. If you had one, I'd be curious to hear from you.

You can always tweet at me on Twitter. It's tech stuff, hsw I too need to get another way for people to reach out because I can totally understand folks not wanting to go to Twitter. But yeah, I'm curious for the zoon owners out there what they thought of the device. Did they like it? What features did they really love? Were there any things that really irritated them about the Zoo? I mean, I'm speaking as someone. My first MP three player was not an iPod. I had a creative Zen

MP three player, and golly, I loved that thing. It was not perfect by a long stretch. It had a lot of issues, but it worked for what I needed it to do. And I didn't have to use iTunes to access it, so that was a big bonus. But I'm curious what Zoo owners thought about their devices. And it's a shame really that Microsoft wasn't able to compete more in the space. And I say that because when you have competition, it really pushes companies to try and

outperform each other. Apple was going hard anyway, They had the lead spot and they just kept going hard. They probably didn't need to go as hard as they did, but we ended up with really good devices as a result of that. But you can't always count on that, right. If a company dominates a market, they don't necessarily need to try to maintain their market position, Whereas when there's competition, companies do have to try in order to win over customers.

So that's kind of why I'm always bombed when something fails. It might have been a complete ridiculous show from beginning to end because of silly decisions. But I don't want to see failures because I want to see competition so that we get even better stuff on the other end of it. That's it for this episode. I hope you enjoyed it. I hope you are all well, and I'll talk to you again really soon. Tech Stuff is an

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