FISTFULAYEN

[NOTE: The views below are my personal views and not necessarily representative of my employer, Yahoo!, or any of the nice people I work with.]

My “tastemaker” daughter scored herself a free Zune, and I helped her install it last evening.� Personally I was pretty excited about the Zune, I really like my Toshiba Gigabeat (on which the Zune is based) and I’m as excited as Gates is to see anything that’ll give the iPod a run for its money, even if they do box-out our product, Yahoo! Music Unlimited, in the process.� I’m sad to report that the Zune install was absolutely anti-climactic — it turns out to be just an MP3 player, yet another hard disk with a screen, with the unfortunate limitation of being tied to a single, proprietary store.� Huge amounts of money spent missing the mark.� Ugh.

The install went fairly well, aside from taking 4000 years.� Funny that the software CD wasn’t inside the main packaging (a little late, perhaps?) and needed to update itself on first run, then needed to install new firmware for the Zune immediately, but it did work in the end (post reboot, annoying). �

The stupidity started when she tried to register for an account, after 5000 questions they denied her access because she told the truth about her age (KIDS, LIE ABOUT YOUR AGE WHEN REGISTERING WITH ZUNE).� Now an “underage” flag is tied to her email addr and I have to create an account and somehow bless her usage — suffice it to say she doesn’t even have a Zune account yet and I don’t know how to help her get one.� I guess I’ll figure that out tonight.

It started auto-loading everything from her HD onto the device.� Not what she wanted, so she stopped it, then tried deleting everything from the device, which didn’t work due to what looked like a bug, so she erased everything from the device (which she later regretted because not only did it get rid of the songs it’d copied on but also the default videos and art files). �

Finally she loaded just the MP3s she wanted into the Zune app, started just the ones she wanted on the Zune syncing, and went to bed.� I stayed up a little longer looking for more videos to load the Zune with.

I couldn’t find a single legal video on the Internet you can put on this device.� Zune Marketplace doesn’t seem to sell any, videos purchased from other stores won’t work since the Zune DRM is proprietary, and I couldn’t even get KeepVid.com to help me out here.� I have a few MPEG videos (like an incredible Joni Mitchell live bit that Andy from Waxy.org sent us), but the Zune doesn’t recognize those.� Maybe I’ll go to the trouble of converting the MPEGs to WMV files.� Not likely.� This morning Zoe put on one Beastie Boys video we had lying around and a couple episodes of This Spartan Life.� Not exactly the overwhelming choice the iTunes store gives you.� Anyone have any advice on how we should get Zoe some videos to load on this thing?

Since we have only one Zune, we’re not able to test the “killer feature”, the ability to share files wirelessly.� Zoe will take it to school today.� If she can’t find one other person with a Zune in one of the biggest high schools in the country (3700 kids), then, well, the feature probably isn’t so killer, is it?� I’ll let you know how that goes.

So far, for us Zoe’s Zune is an overhyped MP3 player.� For Zoe it’s a step backward because all her Yahoo! Music Unlimited subscription tracks won’t play on it.� But seeing how she recently broke yet another player (she’s been through two Creative Micros, both broken, an iRiver H10, lost the proprietary cable, and most recently a Samsung Y-9 that ceased to operate), she’s stoked to have something new.� We’ll see if she ever uses it to do anything other than play MP3s, which she’d be perfectly happy doing with an iPod. �

I’ve gone from being excited about the Zune to being a little sad.� The least Microsoft could have done was show the world that the physics Christensen describes in the The Innovator’s Dilemma was true.� That when the technology is not yet “good enough” (Microsoft’s WMDRM technology is *still* not yet good enough) the integrated solution wins (Apple’s ITMS/iTunes/iPod is the integrated solution, and it’s *really* winning).� BUT (says Christiansen) eventually the technology catches up to what the consumer wants and then overshoots what the consumer needs, making way for disintegrated solutions (such as WMDRM/Yahoo! Music Engine/Toshiba Gigabeat) which are “good enough” and low-cost.� So Microsoft could have AT LEAST spent their time building an integrated solution ON THIS PLATFORM, but they didn’t; they built (and over-invested in) a me-too proprietary system, slowing down or halting the natural Christensenian physics which were supposed to work to the advantage of those of us disintegrated value chain.� Thanks, guys.� We appreciate the help.� It’s hard not to imagine what kind of progress we could have made along this eventuality if you’d have put your resources into YOUR OWN PLATFORM (The one you SADDLED THE REST OF US WITH).� Even if you’d have built an end-to-end solution a la Zune on it, at least you’d be moving us all forward at once.� If portable subscription eventually fails, I’m blaming you.� Period.� OK, maybe the more I think about about it, I’m a little mad in addition to a little sad.

I shot some video of Zoe installing her Zune last evening, if I have time tonight I’ll upload and share.� She’s funny.

ian