3 ms·

You didn't own a Zune. They were FANTASTIC. They did focus on customer experience and usability... they were amazing. I could put MP3s on there just as easil

You didn't own a Zune. They were FANTASTIC. They did focus on customer experience and usability... they were amazing. I could put MP3s on there just as easily as I could an iPod, if not more easily. The whole meaningless, punchline-less joke "Microsoft sux lol" thing that's been happening since the Triassic period is what did the Zune in; bystanders took the almost toothless anti-ms culture shared among nerd communities as if it were something that had an appropriate amount of merit. it had merit, yes, but not anywhere nearly as much as you would think if you listened to Linux nerds talk to each other for more than a few minutes.

headsoup 5y ago
It sure was, I have the ZuneHD still, it's still a beautiful device with an intuitive UI and nice clean software. Pity MS never figured out how to compete in marketing against existing sentiment and Apple (with their horribly clunky UI/Hardware and software of the iPod (which I had to support at work too)). It's a pity my Zune is almost a brick now, there's nothing wrong with it (my daughter listens to music and plays games on it now). If I could put an open source OS on it I'd still be using it (so long as I can sync it with Linux too..)
spinningslate 5y ago
> The whole meaningless, punchline-less joke "Microsoft sux lol" thing You can't mention that without context. Why did Microsoft have a bad rap? Because they'd done bad/ill-considered things and it came back to bite them. The browser wars, Balmer's "linux is cancer" rhetoric [0], trying to create a "Microsoft internet" instead of the Internet, "Embrace, Extend, Extinguish" [1] more generally. To name but a few. The Zune might well have been a good device (don't know), but the "Microsoft sux lol" (as you put it) of the time wasn't meaningless. It was entirely of Microsoft's own doing. [0] https://www.theregister.co.uk/2001/06/02/ballmer_linux_is_a_cancer/ https://www.theregister.co.uk/2001/06/02/ballmer_linux_is_a_... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguish https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguis...
- tjoff 5y ago
  That seems like child-play compared to the google or apple of today. Don't use a chromium browser.
- naikrovek 5y ago
  yes, they earned it. I think I said that. did they earn as much BS as they've gotten over the past two decades? no. Google Amazon and Facebook are doing FAR WORSE things today, and no one says anything. Many readers of this comment likely WORK AT one of these places, and are complicit in the crap these companies do, yet they excuse the things they do in any one of a million ways, just like employees at Microsoft did at the time. many of those same people today still bash on Microsoft for lesser offenses than they themselves are part of, so don't act like there is logic behind any of the derision that gets thrown around. Microsoft derisiveness today is nothing more than bird calls to help nerds find each other in the wild, but then non-nerds hear it and assume that the most common squawks they hear from the flock are true. this is what the Zune was victim to. Windows phone also, likely, which was another excellent product doomed before it hit the market because people like to tell and hear the same jokes over and over and over again. Windows Phone struggled for a while, but it too fell victim to the attitude of the commoner: "I've never once used or even laid eyes on this product, but Microsoft made it so I'm going to poke fun at it endlessly." ever hear a joke about Bing on a non-technical TV show? that's how far this shit reaches. Bing is FAR better than anyone gives it credit for and it gets better all the time. anyone care? nope! "Bing lol"
  - notreallyserio 5y ago
    For me, Bing does, at least some of the time, a much better job surfacing GitHub issues. Identical searches on Google and Bing will return githubmemory and github results respectively (and neither service returns both). I'm not sure Bing ever returns githubmemory results unless you go out of your way to ask for it. I wonder if Bing has solved the clone problem generally.
  - xattt 5y ago
    The ingenuity of the Windows Phone was leveraging technology to do what it did best to make a very fluid, very interactive UI. The tiles and metro text were obviously not very resource heavy to draw, which made for a wonderful experience.
hbn 5y ago
> The whole meaningless, punchline-less joke "Microsoft sux lol" thing that's been happening since the Triassic period is what did the Zune in I don't know if that was near as much of a factor as the fact that Apple had basically solved the digital music problem almost 6 years prior with iTunes and the iPod, and everyone already had their music libraries there.
- headsoup 5y ago
  No, Apple's clever marketing department 'solved' the digital music problem. The iPod was a clunky, unintuitive and buggy product (not to mention the horrors of iTunes), but people didn't care because it was the 'thing to be seen with.' The market was told it was 'easy' so they pushed themselves to work it out.
  - BoxOfRain 5y ago
    >The iPod was a clunky, unintuitive and buggy product (not to mention the horrors of iTunes) I'll give you that iTunes became fairly bloated and annoying to use but I don't think it's fair to describe the iPod as clunky and unintuitive, certainly not in comparison to many of the MP3 players that it competed with. The click wheel was a really good bit of design in my opinion.

headsoup 5y ago

It sure was, I have the ZuneHD still, it's still a beautiful device with an intuitive UI and nice clean software. Pity MS never figured out how to compete in marketing against existing sentiment and Apple (with their horribly clunky UI/Hardware and software of the iPod (which I had to support at work too)). It's a pity my Zune is almost a brick now, there's nothing wrong with it (my daughter listens to music and plays games on it now). If I could put an open source OS on it I'd still be using it (so long as I can sync it with Linux too..)

spinningslate 5y ago

> The whole meaningless, punchline-less joke "Microsoft sux lol" thing You can't mention that without context. Why did Microsoft have a bad rap? Because they'd done bad/ill-considered things and it came back to bite them. The browser wars, Balmer's "linux is cancer" rhetoric [0], trying to create a "Microsoft internet" instead of the Internet, "Embrace, Extend, Extinguish" [1] more generally. To name but a few. The Zune might well have been a good device (don't know), but the "Microsoft sux lol" (as you put it) of the time wasn't meaningless. It was entirely of Microsoft's own doing. [0] https://www.theregister.co.uk/2001/06/02/ballmer_linux_is_a_cancer/ https://www.theregister.co.uk/2001/06/02/ballmer_linux_is_a_... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguish https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguis...

tjoff 5y ago
That seems like child-play compared to the google or apple of today. Don't use a chromium browser.
naikrovek 5y ago
yes, they earned it. I think I said that. did they earn as much BS as they've gotten over the past two decades? no. Google Amazon and Facebook are doing FAR WORSE things today, and no one says anything. Many readers of this comment likely WORK AT one of these places, and are complicit in the crap these companies do, yet they excuse the things they do in any one of a million ways, just like employees at Microsoft did at the time. many of those same people today still bash on Microsoft for lesser offenses than they themselves are part of, so don't act like there is logic behind any of the derision that gets thrown around. Microsoft derisiveness today is nothing more than bird calls to help nerds find each other in the wild, but then non-nerds hear it and assume that the most common squawks they hear from the flock are true. this is what the Zune was victim to. Windows phone also, likely, which was another excellent product doomed before it hit the market because people like to tell and hear the same jokes over and over and over again. Windows Phone struggled for a while, but it too fell victim to the attitude of the commoner: "I've never once used or even laid eyes on this product, but Microsoft made it so I'm going to poke fun at it endlessly." ever hear a joke about Bing on a non-technical TV show? that's how far this shit reaches. Bing is FAR better than anyone gives it credit for and it gets better all the time. anyone care? nope! "Bing lol"
- notreallyserio 5y ago
  For me, Bing does, at least some of the time, a much better job surfacing GitHub issues. Identical searches on Google and Bing will return githubmemory and github results respectively (and neither service returns both). I'm not sure Bing ever returns githubmemory results unless you go out of your way to ask for it. I wonder if Bing has solved the clone problem generally.
- xattt 5y ago
  The ingenuity of the Windows Phone was leveraging technology to do what it did best to make a very fluid, very interactive UI. The tiles and metro text were obviously not very resource heavy to draw, which made for a wonderful experience.

hbn 5y ago

> The whole meaningless, punchline-less joke "Microsoft sux lol" thing that's been happening since the Triassic period is what did the Zune in I don't know if that was near as much of a factor as the fact that Apple had basically solved the digital music problem almost 6 years prior with iTunes and the iPod, and everyone already had their music libraries there.

headsoup 5y ago
No, Apple's clever marketing department 'solved' the digital music problem. The iPod was a clunky, unintuitive and buggy product (not to mention the horrors of iTunes), but people didn't care because it was the 'thing to be seen with.' The market was told it was 'easy' so they pushed themselves to work it out.
- BoxOfRain 5y ago
  >The iPod was a clunky, unintuitive and buggy product (not to mention the horrors of iTunes) I'll give you that iTunes became fairly bloated and annoying to use but I don't think it's fair to describe the iPod as clunky and unintuitive, certainly not in comparison to many of the MP3 players that it competed with. The click wheel was a really good bit of design in my opinion.