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Seriously, what's with the Zune team? It was 80% of a competitive player when it came out, but it seems like Apple's gone through two major refreshes since then, and the Zune has just been sitting there, quietly obsolescing.

I would have thought that if Microsoft were going to up-end its whole licensing-based platform model (which was starting to result in some really decent players), it would mean that they were going to be aggressive as hell as a hardware maker. But all they've released is one pretty decent (but now hideously dated) hard drive player. No flash player, no fancy phone thing.

And what's worse, the main distinguishing feature of the Zune, the Wi-Fi capability, was useless out of the box (nobody "shares"), but it was hinted that you'd eventually be able to download songs wirelessly with it, and here we are in late 2007 and you still can't do that on the Zune, but you can on the iPod.

It's just all very amazingly lackadaisacal. The media folks at Microsoft used to (justly) complain about how bad Creative and other OEM hardware was, back when they were acting as a platform licensor, but today Creative and iAudio both have better product lineups than Zune does.

(And I'm not really wild about the idea of a Zune phone, either. I like my Windows Mobile phone, and making it more closed and proprietary is hardly my idea of an improvement. Maybe they'll surprise me and release some really great hardware, but based on their track record, I really doubt it.)

It's all so very frustrating to me, because there was a time in 2005 when it really looked like Microsoft got media and was on the way to doing something really great. Relatively open subscription services that worked with any devices (including really sweet PMC devices), Windows Media Center, and the Extender functionality of the 360 plus Windows Media Connect and the promise of devices that'd work well with that, WMA support on Windows Mobile phones, solid support for WMA Lossless to enable digital archiving... it was all coming together.

And then it all fell apart. Nothing supports WMA Lossless any more (not even the Zune), the 360 is way too loud to be a useful Extender, PMC and PlaysForSure are both killed by the Zune, devices that work with WMC have been terrible, playing media on a WM phone is a horrid experience, the DVR functionality of Media Center was made irrelevant because of restrictions on CableCard support, and in general this whole ecosystem was systematically ignored or actively torn down by Microsoft and its partners.

So in 2007, I sit here with my music archive in FLAC, streaming to a (Perl-based) Logitech Squeezebox, no music subscription service, an MP3 player running open-source Rockbox firmware, and a Tivo Series3. Open source stuff may have lots of flaws, but at least it works and won't get abandoned in a corporate strategy shift.

Until MS can rev up its development cycle Apple will be 3 revs ahead of anything the Zune has planned. That team needs some serious new paradigm of operating to compete with Jobs Inc. I agree, the Zune is dead. I am ordering my new iPod right now.