While I’m sure that Microsoft didn’t expect to overtake the iPod’s marketshare immediately, how long will it take to even start? I think it’s obvious that to win, M$ will have to come out with some pretty significant improvements to silence the critics in their second gen version. However they may never be able to since most of the faults seem to lie with the DRM limits on transferred songs – if you send a song to someone via the WiFi built-in to each Zune, that song can only be play a max of three times or auto-expires after 3 days. Since the record labels seem to require DRM on any officially-sanctioned music available through online stores, this probably won’t go away.
My main gripe is not with the limits of transferred songs so much as *how* they get transferred: the only way this has been shown to work is to actively SEND someone near you a particular song. I think they are completely missing the point of accessing music through an mp3 player itself: browsing other peoples music and TAKING what you want. For myself this strength would be self-evident: in the student union I used to bring my Tablet PC (no I cannot just call it a laptop, I have to show off ‘cuz a Tablet is worth some geek cred, dig?), open iTunes and look through all the music on everyone’s laptop around me. This was a great way to get a break from my own collection, and very amusing as well since some people have such horrible tastes.
So, in conclusion, Zune not doing so hot during its launch right now, why the hell did they setup the wireless transfer capabilities backwards? And don’t even get me started on the commercials which are clearly a product made by committee because no director worth they probably paid is that much of a hack. Well, maybe…