In September 2008 I added an article to San Francisco Classical Music Examiner (I don’t write that column anymore) in which I compared Microsoft’s Zune Marketplace software to Apple’s iTune Store. The idea was to find out how well Zune did against iTunes in searching for a particular classical album.
The Zune Marketplace failed every search. It turned out that the designers of the thing had no concept of classical music. There was no way to search for both composer and performer. The Zune people were completely pop-oriented, and to them composer and performer were pretty much the same thing. And to them an album was a collection of tracks. I gave it a few more tries, but it was clear that I was in an alien, even hostile territory. The contrast has grown even more glaring since I wrote the article, given the rise of classical sites such as Passionato.com and The Classical Shop, both of which offer excellent search capabilities and a thorough knowledge of the genres in question, and both of which offer lossless files that do not involve any compromise in sound quality. ArkivMusic started offering downloads at reasonably high quality, although not quite lossless. And ClassicsOnline continues to be its excellent self. The iTunes store could benefit from higher-quality downloads, but for searching, selection, and ease of use, it remains a first-class operation, very classical-friendly.
The Zune Marketplace was designed to complement Microsoft’s foray into the portable player business, the Zune. Apparently it was a perfectly decent piece of hardware, especially in its second incarnation when it dropped its ridiculously clunky design in favor of something distinctly more gracious. But so much about it was wrong—for example, the background pictures that accompanied the gizmo’s setup software, one of which looked for all the world like a woman being held on the ground and assaulted while she screamed. (Presumably they thought she was just squealing with pleasure over her new Zune.) That aforesaid setup software was initially crawling with bugs and incompatibilities. The colors—brown!—were wrong. The “squirt” feature was some marketer’s idea and never caught on, exacerbated by there never being anyone around to squirt to. And that name: squirt? Perhaps a stern lecture on safe squirting was needed before proceeding. Microsoft’s color-blindness and tone-deafness were never more glaring than in the original Zune and its software.
From the standpoint of a classical musician, the Zune was a non-starter. The software ran only on Windows, and most musicians are Mac people. You could rip your own CDs of course and use them on the Zune, but that was hardly a compelling advantage of the iTunes/iPod/iPhone combo, which can do the same thing. There was nothing about the Zune that recommended it over an iPod, but a fair number of disadvantages, and once the iPhone came out the gap widened to the point of the Zune’s falling into complete invisibility.
So Microsoft has killed off further development. Apparently they plan on subsuming the Zune software into the Windows 7 phone series. But it’s yet another try-fail from the giant of Redmond.
Here’s something that really gets me. Years and years ago—we’re talking early 1990s here—I bought a copy of Excel for the Mac to run on my then brand-new Mac SE. One of the floppy discs wouldn’t install. I called up Microsoft’s toll-free help number. I got, believe it or not, one of Excel’s programmers—they had a habit in those days of rotating programmers in and out of tech support, so as to give them a solid idea of what worked and didn’t in their software. The fellow was sweet and friendly and realized shortly that I had defective floppies. They sent me new ones overnight post. And all was well.
Excel was a terrific product, and still is. Microsoft’s programming environments are first-rate. They’ve had some real busts with their operating systems—Windows ME and of course the horrid Vista—but they’ve also gotten it very, very right sometimes as well, as Windows 2000 and its successor Windows XP made abundantly clear. But the Zune is a prime example of Microsoft’s worst character trait: trying to play catch-up, throwing money at inferior products, and eventually throwing in the towel.
Closure on the Zune. This probably should have happened a year ago. Or perhaps the Zune should have been killed in committee. Well, it’s on the road to collector’s status now.
How apropos this would become news on the same day that lines are snaking down the sidewalks at the Apple stores, everybody just drooling for the iPad 2.