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Comment by untog | Hacker News Reader

The only one I still think was a missed opportunity is Zune. I have a Windows Phone and love it, but a lot of my friends consider the concept of a Windows Phone "icky". I don't think that Zune was such a failed brand that a Zune Phone couldn't have happened. Of course, I doubt business buyers would like that.

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I really love the Zune product (to the point where I'm afraid of being branded a shill whenever I talk about it). Windows Phone is a nice system, but the Zune aspect is what sold me on it versus an iPhone. There's literally nothing that compares, and I'm amazed Apple has fallen so far behind.

Microsoft needs to do some image control to become "cool" again. They've got some amazing products that are right on the bleeding edge (Xbox, Zune/WP7, Windows 8 is kind of out-there and radical for better or worse), but Xbox is the only successfully "cool" brand they have. Because it doesn't have "Windows" attached to it.

If Zune was redefined as a phone (Not Zune Phone, just Zune), it would sell like hotcakes.

I have never owned or seen (IRL) a Zune. What's so great about it? What makes it better than an iPod?

Streaming service and the software. I absolutely love the zune software. It is so much better than iTunes it's a bit ridiculous.

The Zune software is so good, I know many people who use it even though they don't have a Zune, myself included.

For starters the software doesn't crush your machine as iTunes does to Windows.

Second of all, the physical player doesn't magically get a 'corrupted OS' or 'unhappy folder face' problem once a year - requiring trips to the Genius Bar.

The software does everything iTunes does like recommendations, folder tracking, etc - except you could get 'all you can eat' music for $10 / month.

In general the Zune HD device is just sick. Metro UI, intuitive touchscreen, and most importantly, completely unbreakable.

I have to second the completely unbreakable part. I have dropped it whilst biking many times (seriously I'm embarrassed to say like 4 times) and it has only a few minor dings to show for it despite tumbling on asphalt at 10-15 mph. It seems like the thickness of the aluminum bezel coupled with the thinner screen width protects the screen better than the ipod touch's. I also prefer the UI and basically what it came down to when deciding between the two for me was what I wanted: a really good touchsceen mp3 player or a more generally useful device/portable gaming machine. I already have my phone for the latter purpose so I went with the best mp3 player.

I did have mine "break" but I can still use it. Somehow the screen cracked from the inside. Speculation is the battery was overcharged and swelled. I looked it up on the Internet and pretty much every discussion about it was filled with people claiming those with broken screens must be lying or had damaged it somehow. Microsoft doesn't acknowledge a problem.

Oh well. It still works, and I have my WP7 now. The Zune is just for biking.

For me, it's the seamless integration of both playing and retrieving music. If I'm listening to the Black Keys, I can press their Artist name, load up a list of all their albums, then choose which one I want to stream or immediately download to my device (with a $9.99/month fee, like Spotify etc.)

Last time I used an iPhone they had a complete separation between the music player and the iTunes Store. Never understood why.

Prior to the iPod Touch, I liked Zune's navigation and found it much more intuitive and useful than the wheel that iPods used. The software was also good and it played music just as well as the iPod.

I think the UI/interface for the ZuneHD was much better than the iPod Touch as well, and the software is still better than iTunes (although both are kinda behemoths). The iPod Touch wins on having the App Store though, the Zune just really never competed in that area for me. Now I go with an Android phone, and with Google Music, my ZuneHD hasn't been used in forever.

Adding to the list of everything everyone has mentioned (which I also agree with), a major factor for me is the Zune Pass (and it the main point where I mention Apple is so terribly far behind). $10/mo for (quite nearly) the entire catalog. They have SmartDJ (I think Apple has the Genius Match or something? Similar idea) where you can pick a song and it will play similar songs to it. With the Zune Pass, it will pick songs from the Zune library as well, possibly songs you've never heard. It's great for finding new artists with a similar feel to the bands you love. Years back, this is how I found the Black Keys. Plugged Seven Nation Army into SmartDJ and there was Stack Shot Billy.

If you cancel, you lose access to the songs after 3 days, but each month you get 10 songs without DRM to download and keep forever. At 99c per song, you're basically paying for one album per month and getting the rest of the library for free. And if you're a little more creative, there are ways of making the songs "lose" their DRM.

Everyone I know that has had a Zune, really loved it. They praised it. The people who didn't have a Zune talked about it negatively on the basis that it was a Microsoft product and no one in their right mind would invest in a Microsoft product. They usually have no future. Sadly, this stereotype rings truer and truer with each passing year.

I don't think it's an image problem, really. It's a focus problem.

I'd never buy a piece of Microsoft portable tech, because they always end up killing everything they release within a few years.

If they could just stick with something for a while, I might have some confidence, but between PlaysForSure (hah!), Zune, Kin, etc, they give me no REASON to trust them.

I really don't think that Microsoft killed Zune, in the way that they killed Kin. They just integrated it into Windows Phone. In many ways they're just going with the flow on that- far fewer people buy dedicated music playing devices now that their smartphones do it.

Zune is still going strong. It's the music app for WP7 (which MS has a lot of money riding on), for Xbox (which MS has a lot of money riding on), and for Windows 8 (which MS has their entire corporation riding on). It's been successful, if not wildly so. I don't think Zune is going anywhere.

It’s funny you say that, because what ultimately soured me on buying Apple products was my iPhone 3G being effectively bricked by the 4.0 update, two years after I bought it (and, theoretically, days after some other people bought it from AT&T).

Microsoft may rebrand stuff in weird ways sometimes, but they don’t often kill stuff off prematurely. I’d actually argue the opposite: that they often hang onto stuff for too long.

As to your examples, PlaysForSure was only really killed from the perspective of manufacturers, or if you heavily bought into the MSN Music Store. The Kin was an extenuating circumstance, but no doubt a huge fuckup. Zune may be getting a rebrand, but I’ve heard no reason to believe a Zune player won’t continue to work with Windows 8.

All you’ve really done is name three failures of a company that has hundreds of projects. One could do the same thing for Apple, Google, or almost any other tech company.

I think the first thing they should do to improve their "cool" factor is to make Zune work on non-Windows platforms. I think the Zune software, hardware, and service are all fantastic but more and more the cool kids aren't using Windows, and in my experience running the Zune software in a VM adds enough friction that it usually isn't worth it.

Yeah, I doubt many people buying macs would get a Windows Phone/Zune instead of the Apple equivalent.

And while all the cool kids are using Linux, I don't really expect Linux support :(

I've got a MBP and a Lumia. The WP7 connector that's available on the Mac App Store allows you to sync your WP7 with iTunes/iPhoto, but doesn't include the Zune player itself, which is so much nicer than iTunes.

Yea, but until Zune works on my mac, there's no way I'd even consider it. Microsoft has to play nice with the other kids in the yards to get my money.

A big reason I hear from many Zune users is that iTunes doesn't play nice on Windows. I know back when I used iTunes (up until 2007), it was horrible. Slow, slow, slow. It would hang the system for over a minute to start up, it would update every couple days and attempt to force-install Quicktime and Safari, and the updates were around a hundred MB every time.

Apple has amazing software developers. There's no reason for iTunes for Windows to suck. A common conspiracy theory is they do it on purpose to show how awful Windows is. I don't know if that's true, but that's how it feels to me.

So for that reason, I'd rather have no iTunes support on my PC and have the easy choice made for me than to break out of the ecosystem to find a worse experience. I almost bought an iPhone until I remembered the desktop software was iTunes.

--edit, I'm sorry this felt like an anti-iTunes rant. I didn't mean it to be that way. What I really meant to say was "Microsoft doesn't play nice with Apple, but Apple doesn't play nice with Microsoft either." Though Microsoft does have a Windows Phone connector for Mac, and like an iPhone, a WP doesn't need Zune software to function.

Yea, but until Zune works on my mac, there's no way I'd even consider it. Microsoft has to play nice with the other kids in the yards to get my money.

It does. Well, Windows Phone does at least, which is as close as you can get to buying a Zune device now. There's an app called "Windows Phone Connector" in the App Store.

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