After a trip to the thesaurus to avoid suggestive language, I decided to talk about the many bilkings of Microsoft regarding the Zune HD.
Now I know what you’re saying: “But the Zune HD is a proprietary device running proprietary software and Microsoft is evil and Android is great and so on and so forth.” Yeah, I know that the Zune HD is proprietary and closed-off. And yes, I’m aware of the fact that this is a blog dedicated to open-source. Just let me explain:
Today I took a nice drive to Best Buy and killed about an hour or so. I spent a good long while looking over all the media players: iPods, Android Tablets (the ones I used were sooo sucky), the Sansa Fuze (meh), and the Zune HD. The hardware on the Zune HD is actually quite Apple-like. Good build quality, nice design, lite as a feather. I fired it up, and lo and behold, I was instantly impressed with the interface. I’d seen it before, but I’d never taken the time to give it a stroll in person. It was snappy and elegant, and, to be quite honest, very non-Microsoft. I wouldn’t mind taking that bad boy home for myself. They really outdid themselves with that model. But their sales are less than impressive, and the device is considered a great big flop. Why?
I’ve been an iPod user for the past four or five years. When the iPod Touch first came out I saved up my money and ran out to buy it. The iPod Touch was completely proprietary, and could only be synced with iTunes. For the longest time I couldn’t even think about using it with Linux. Fast forward, now we have libimobiledevice and libipod, created by many hackers who were dedicated and reverse engineered the iPod protocols. People were excited and diligent, and solved that problem.
That didn’t happen with the Zune HD. Instead of reverse engineering and finding a solution, people just kind of sat on their hands and said “phooey on it!”
I’m not saying it’s the open-source community’s fault that the Zune HD was a dud. In fact, I’m pointing most of the blame over at Microsoft for not using standards like MTP and for making their software PC only (I could even let them slide if they had a Mac version). They locked unenthused users into a sandbox, and people decided that they would just rather go elsewhere.
But here’s the bottom line: if this were an Apple product, that wouldn’t have happened. Developers would have banded together and found some type of workaround by now. I think that the community needs to get this problem fixed, if only for the benefit of Zune/Ubuntu users. Who knows, I’m sure that are many people who only stay on Windows for that specific use case. Not to mention that the new Windows Phone 7 phones use the same protocols.
Heck, I’ll even put my money where my mouth is: if we get Zune HD/Windows Phone 7 libraries implemented in some major media player (Banshee would be perfect) this year (2011) I will fork out the money for a Zune HD.