Okay, I want to start this deep dive with a little
psychological experiment. A word association
game. Oh, I like this. Okay. I'm going to give
you a single word, just one, and I want you to
tell me the very first image, the most visceral,
immediate picture that pops into your head. Don't
overthink it, just react. Ready. I am born ready.
Lay it on me. Oh, okay. Immediately, I see a
brick. A brown plastic brick. Right. It is instantaneous.
It's not even a question. You don't think of
music. You don't think of software or the interface.
You think of that specific distinctively muddy
color. It's arguably one of the most memorable
visuals in consumer electronics history. But
for all the wrong reasons, it's the punchline.
It really is. It's the scene in Guardians of
the Galaxy where Star -Lord gets the Zune. And
it's treated like this ancient alien artifact
of failure. It became the cultural shorthand
for the thing that tried to be an a**hole. iPod
and lost. Exactly. It's the high profile underdog
that never had its rocky moment. It's the device
that you pull out of a drawer 15 years later
and, you know, you laugh about it. You do. But,
and this is why we are here today, I think we
have completely misunderstood the Zune. I think
the brown brick meme has actually obscured a
much more interesting and frankly much more tragic
story. I would agree with that completely. When
you actually look at the documents, the internal
strategy memos from Microsoft, the hardware specs,
the review scores from the time and the postmortems,
the story isn't. Microsoft made a bad iPod. No,
not at all. The story is that Microsoft actually
built the future of music streaming, packaged
it in a device that was weirdly ahead of its
time, and then accidentally set it on fire with
terrible marketing and a few critical glitches.
And that is our mission for this deep dive. We
are going to move past the jokes. We're going
to look at the Zune not as a failure, but as
a fascinating case study in innovation, timing,
and corporate hubris. For sure. We have a mountain
of sources here. Tech reviews from 2006, retrospectives
on the interface design, financial reports from
the height of the MP3 wars, and even some deep
dives into the code that caused it to freeze.
And we're going to answer a specific question.
How did a device that cost Microsoft billions
of dollars end up saving their design soul? Because
the DNA of the Zune is still running on the computer
you use today, even if you don't realize it.
So to understand the end, we have to understand
the beginning. We need to set the scene. Take
us back to the landscape of 2006. 2006. It's
a different world. Twitter is just launching
and nobody understands it. It's just people texting,
I'm eating a sandwich to the internet. I remember
that. Facebook is barely open to the public.
It's still mostly just for college kids. But
in the world of digital music, the war is over.
And Apple won. Apple didn't just win. They salted
the earth. By the time the Zune is preparing
to launch in November 2006, the iPod holds a
63 % market share of portable media players.
63%. And that number actually understates it
because in terms of cultural mind share, it was
probably 99%. It was the Kleenex of MP3 players.
You didn't say, I'm bringing my MP3 player. You
said, I'm bringing my iPod. You saw those white
earbuds everywhere. It was a status symbol. Exactly.
And Microsoft is sitting there in Redmond. looking
at this monopoly and they are panicking because
up until this point, Microsoft had a very specific
strategy for music and it was failing miserably.
This was the place for sure era, right? Yes.
And we have to talk about place for sure because
it is the crucial context for why the Zune even
exists. Even the name sounds desperate. Place
for sure. It's like a car company calling their
new model the it starts hopefully. It really
does imply a lack of confidence, doesn't it?
But the strategy was classic Microsoft. Historically,
Microsoft is a platform company. They build Windows
and they let Dell, HP, and Lenovo build the computers.
The old model. They build the OS, you build the
box. Exactly. They tried to do the same thing
with music. So they had a DRM system digital
rights management called Janus. And they had
a music store called MSN Music. which launched
around 2004. The idea was you buy a song from
MSN, it's wrapped in Microsoft's encryption,
and then you can put it on any device that has
the Place for Sure logo. So who was making the
devices? All the other guys? Everyone who wasn't
Apple. Creative, Samsung, iRiver, SanDisk. There
was this army of plastic gray rectangles flooding
the shelves at Best Buy. I remember having a
Creative Zen back in the day. It was fine, you
know. It did the job, but it felt like a piece
of lab equipment compared to an iPod. How so?
It had distinct buttons, a weird menu system.
It felt like a gadget, not an experience. It
wasn't elegant. That was the problem. The user
experience was fragmented. You'd buy a song,
try to sync it to your Samsung device, and maybe
the drivers were out of date. That's the drivers.
Or maybe the firmware on the player didn't match
the DRM version on your computer. It was clunky.
It did not play for sure. It played, maybe. It
played eventually if you reinstall the drivers.
Meanwhile, Apple has the walled garden. They
make the iPod. They make iTunes. They make the
Fairplay DRM. It's a closed loop. You plug it
in. It syncs. You walk away. It's simple. And
Microsoft, being Microsoft, looks at the numbers
and realizes, OK, our partners are incompetent.
If we want to beat Apple, we can't rely on Samsung
or Creative to design a cool gadget. We have
to do it ourselves. This is a massive pivot for
them. This is Microsoft saying, for one of the
first times, we are going to become a hardware
company. A consumer hardware company, which they
had only successfully done once before. The Xbox.
The Xbox. Right. That context is so important.
The Xbox launched in 2001. And by 2006, the Xbox
360 is a massive hit. It proved that Microsoft
could make hardware that cool people actually
wanted. That they could capture the living room.
Exactly. So the executives in Redmond said, get
us the Xbox guys. Do for music what you did for
gaming. Enter Jay Allard. Jay Allard is a legend
in Microsoft history. He was the visionary behind
the Xbox. He was young. He was bald. He wore
hoodies. He was the anti -Bill Gates in terms
of image. He was the cool executive. He was their
Steve Jobs in a way. In a way, yeah. They put
him in charge of this new music project, codenamed
Project Argo. Argo. I like that. It sounds adventurous.
Like they're sailing into dangerous, dangerous
waters. It was a serious initiative. They decided
to kill Plays for Sure. They were going to burn
their own partners. They told Creative and Samsung,
sorry, we're competing with you now. Good luck.
That must have gone over well. Oh, it was a bloodbath
in the industry relationships. But Microsoft
felt they had no choice. They needed to control
the whole stack. The device, the software, the
store. They were building an ecosystem, not just
a gadget. They wanted to create an anti -iPod.
But they didn't build the hardware entirely from
scratch, did they? Because they were on a really
tight timeline. I was reading in the notes about
the Toshiba 1089. Right. So because they were
in a rush to catch the holiday season of 2006,
they couldn't engineer a device from the ground
up in six months. That takes years. Impossible.
So they partnered with Toshiba. There was an
existing device called the Toshiba Gigabit S.
The Gigabit. Another entry in the Hall of Fame
of terrible MP3 player names. The MP3 era was
a graveyard of bad names. It really was. But
the Gigabit S was actually a decent device. Microsoft
took the guts of the Gigabit, redesigned the
shell, wrote entirely new software for it, and
that became the first Zune. So it was a hybrid.
It was. If you look at the FCC filings from 2006,
the Zune is literally listed as the Toshiba 1089.
So effectively, they took a Toshiba body, gave
it a Microsoft brain, and painted it a very specific
color. Which brings us to the launch. November
2006 rolls around. They launched the Zune 30.
The Zune 30, named for its 30 -gigabyte hard
drive. A nice, straightforward name, at least.
Let's talk about this device physically, because
the specs were actually pretty competitive, weren't
they? If you strip away the branding and just
look at the sheet. They were better than competitive.
In some ways, they were superior to the iPod
Classic of the time. It had a larger screen,
3 inches, compared to the iPod's 2 .5. Which
was a big deal for video. A huge deal. And it
had an FM radio, which people forget was a huge
request back then. The iPod never had a radio.
That was a big differentiator for commuters who
wanted to listen to morning drive times or NPR.
Apple always refused to add it because they thought
it was old tech. Exactly. And the screen was
landscape oriented, which made it better for
video. Yeah. But none of that mattered because
of the design choices. The aesthetic. The aesthetic.
Microsoft used a manufacturing process called
double shot injection molding. Basically, you
have a layer of colored plastic and a layer of
clear plastic over it. It gives it this depth,
this premium feel. It sounds nice in theory.
It is nice. If you hold a Zoom 30 today, it feels
solid. It doesn't feel cheap. The color is deep
inside the material. But the color choices, they
launched with black, white, and brown. Why brown?
I need to understand this. Who sat in a boardroom
and said, you know what the kids want? The color
of dirt. The color of mud. The logic was actually
rooted. In high fashion, if you can believe it.
I cannot. They were looking at luxury goods.
Think about premium leather wallets, expensive
belts, mahogany furniture, high -end luggage.
They're trying to evoke a sense of warmth and
organic texture. To contrast with Apple's sterile
white. Precisely. They wanted it to feel like
a crafted object. Apple is cold, clinical, sci
-fi. We are warm, human, organic. But the execution
didn't read as luxury leather. No. It read as...
Well, poop. A turd. A brick of chocolate left
in the sun. It was immediately mocked. The tech
blogs, which were just gaining power at this
time, sites like Engadget and Gizmodo, they tore
it apart. They called it the brick. It looked
clunky. It had hard angles. And that first impression
matters so much. You're launching against the
coolest product on the planet. You can't just
be good. You have to be desirable. And brown
is rarely the color of desire in consumer electronics.
It's true. Even today, how many brown phones
do you see? It's a risky color. And for a company
like Microsoft, which was already seen as the
uncool office productivity company, trying to
pull off high fashion brown was a stretch. You
just reinforce the idea that they didn't get
it. But putting the color aside, the hardware
didn't stay a brick forever. I feel like the
Zoom 30 is the only one people remember because
of the memes. But the evolution happened really
fast. It did. The second generation arrived just
a year later in 2007. Yeah. And this is where
the hardware actually got really good. They introduced
the Zune pad. This is the squircle. The squircle.
A rounded square is a stroke of genius. Apple
had the patent on the click wheel, which was,
let's be honest, the greatest navigation tool
ever invented for music. It was so satisfying,
that circular scrolling motion. Microsoft couldn't
use a wheel, so they made a touch -sensitive
pad. You could flick your thumb up and down to
scroll, like you do on a smartphone screen today.
But you could also click the buttons physically.
It was a hybrid. That's actually a really difficult
engineering challenge, to mix capacitive touch
with physical tactile feedback. It was. And it
worked beautifully. It was fast. You could fly
through lists of songs. They also expanded the
line. They realized that hard drive players were
heavy, so they launched the Zune 4 and Zune 8.
A flash memory players? Right. Tiny credit card
size to fight the iPod Nano. Yeah. And then...
Bigger hard drive ones, the 80 and the 120. And
this is where they started doing the customization
stuff, right? Zune Originals. This was a great
idea. You could go to their website and order
a Zune with custom artwork laser edged onto the
back. I remember seeing those. They hired legit
artists to do these designs. Psychedelic patterns,
abstract art tattoos. You could pick crazy color
combinations. Which is something Apple never
really did. Apple was very... You will take the
white one or maybe the black one and you will
like it. Apple was uniform. Zune was trying to
be expressive. Music is personal. Your players
should be too. It was a smart angle. It gave
them a personality that wasn't just we are the
other guys. But if we are talking about the hardware
peak, the absolute Mona Lisa of the Zune lineup,
we have to jump to 2009. The Zune HD. The Zune
HD. It breaks my heart a little just talking
about it. Why? Because it is a genuinely magnificent
piece of machinery that nobody bought. It's like
a great album that never charted. Paint the picture
for us. 2009. What was this thing? Imagine a
slab of glass and aluminum. Screws exposed. Industrial
chic. It was smaller than an iPod Touch. And
the screen... It was an OLED. Explain why OLED
matters here. Because in 2009, most screens were
LCD, right? Everything was LCD. Yeah. Well, the
T -screens have a backlight. Even when the screen
is showing black, the light is on, so it's actually
a dark gray. OLED organic light emitting diode
emits its own light. Each pixel makes its own
light. Exactly. So when a pixel is black, it
is off. It is perfectly inky black. So the contrast
is infinite. The colors popped in a way that
nothing else on the market did. The iPhone didn't
get an OLED screen until the iPhone X, nearly
a decade later. A full decade. The Zune HD had
it in 2009. That is wild. They were 10 years
ahead on the screen tech. Inside, it had an NVIDIA
Tegra chip. This was a powerhouse processor usually
used for much bigger devices. It could play 720p
HD video out to a TV via a dock. It had an HD
radio receiver built in. It was arguably the
most advanced portable media player ever made.
And the reviews back this up. This wasn't just
Microsoft hype. Overwhelmingly. Farhad Manjoo,
who is not an easy critic to please, wrote in
Slate that if you bought a Zune HD over an iPod
Touch, you wouldn't have regretted it. That's
high praise. TechRadar, CNET, they all praised
the hardware. They said it felt better in the
hand than the iPod. The build quality was exceptional.
So we have a device that is objectively great.
Superior screen, great build quality, snappy
performance. Why didn't it work? Why didn't everyone
throw away their iPods? Well, that leads us to
the philosophy. You can have the best hardware
in the world, but if your story doesn't resonate,
you're dead. And Microsoft was trying to tell
a very specific story with the Zoom. Welcome
to the social. That was the tagline. Which, again,
feels like a misread of the room. When I think
of MP3 players, especially back then, I think
of headphones on, world off. I'm on the subway.
I don't want to talk to people. You want to be
in your own bubble. Right. That was Apple's marketing
genius. The silhouette adds. A person dancing
alone against a bright background. Pure individualism.
You are the star of your own music video. A private
concert. Microsoft tried to zig where Apple zagged.
They said, no, music is a communal experience.
Music is how we bond. Music is for sharing. And
they built a feature to force this bonding. The
infamous Wi -Fi sharing. Codenamed. And I'm sorry
I have to say this. Squirt. Grown, stop. Let
me squirt you this song. Who approved that? Was
there no adult in the room? It was an internal
engineering term, like squirting data across
a wire, that somehow leaked out into the public
consciousness, though they officially called
it Zune -to -Zune sharing. Thank goodness. But
the concept was actually revolutionary. How did
it work? The Zune had Wi -Fi. The iPod didn't.
If you and I were standing at a bus stop and
I was listening to a great new track, I could
press a button. Find your Zune wirelessly and
beam the song to you. That sounds like magic.
Today we have AirDrop, but that's mostly for
photos or links. Sharing a song file instantly.
That's the dream. It is the dream. Imagine discovering
a band and spreading it virally through a crowd
at a festival. But then, the lawyers got involved.
Record labels? Of course. The record labels were
terrified. They looked at this feature and saw
Napster in a pocket. They thought if people can
share songs, nobody will ever buy them again.
So they forced Microsoft to cripple the feature.
This is the three plays rule. Three plays or
three days. If I sent you a song, you couldn't
keep it. You would sit in your inbox. You could
listen to it three times or keep it for three
days, whichever came first. After that, poof.
Gone. That is so frustrating. It takes a magical
moment. Here's a gift. I love this song and turns
it into a chore. Hurry up and listen to this
before it explodes. It destroyed the value proposition.
It felt stingy. It felt like a trial version,
not a social connection. And here's the other
problem. Network effects. Right. For Zoom to
Zoom sharing to work, you need another person
with a Zoom. Exactly. And because Zoom market
share was so low. the odds of you actually meeting
another person with a Zune in the wild were statistically
insignificant. So you had this social feature
that you could never use because you were the
only guy at the party with the brown brick. It
was a lonely social network. Ideally, they should
have fought the labels harder. But I guess in
2006, the labels still held all the cards. Streaming
hadn't broken their power yet. They did. But
there was another part of the service that Microsoft
got right. And this is the part that really hurts
to look back on. The Zune Pass. The Zune Pass.
Okay, let's unpack this. Because when I read
about this, I realized I'm basically paying for
Zune Pass today, just under a different name.
You are. We all are. In 2006, the dominant model
was iTunes. You pay 99 cents. You get one song.
It's a digital record store a la carte. You own
the file. Ownership was king. That was the whole
idea. Ownership was king. Microsoft looked at
the future and said, subscription. For $14 .99
a month, you got the Zune Pass. Unlimited downloads.
You could download the entire catalog if you
had the hard drive space. So it was Spotify before
Spotify. It was Spotify, but downloadable. You
didn't need a constant internet connection. You
synced the songs, and as long as you kept paying
the monthly fee, they worked. But $15 a month
felt expensive back then. People were used to
buying one album a month for $10. It did. which
is why Microsoft added the Keep incentive. This
was the best deal in the history of digital music,
bar none. I still can't believe they offered
this. The 10 tracks rule. Yes. Every month, on
top of the unlimited listening, you could pick
10 songs to download and keep forever, DRM -free.
Even if you cancel the subscription, those 10
songs were yours. So let's do the math. 10 songs
on iTunes costs $10. The subscription is $15.
So you are basically paying $5 a month for unlimited
access to all the music in the world. Correct.
It was practically free streaming. It was an
incredible value. But consumers just couldn't
wrap their heads around it. We weren't ready.
We weren't ready to stop owning our music. People
looked at the $15 fee and said, but I don't own
anything at the end of the month. The concept
of access over ownership hadn't clicked yet.
It's the curse of being too early. You look wrong,
even if you're right. And Microsoft was terrible
at explaining it. Their ads were weird and abstract.
They should have just put up a billboard that
said Spotify for $5. But Spotify didn't exist,
so they couldn't make the comparison. They were
describing a color to people who had only ever
seen black and white. Perfectly put. So they
have the tech Wi -Fi sharing. They have the business
model subscriptions. But they can't sell it.
And then the glitches start. We can't do a deep
dive on the Zune without talking about the Great
Leap Year meltdown. The Zune 30 freeze, New Year's
Eve 2008. The story is incredible. It's like
Y2K, but it actually happened, and only to people
with brown bricks. It's at the scene. It's December
31st, 2008. People are getting ready for parties.
They plug in their Zunes to load up a playlist
for the night, and the screen freezes. Just freezes.
It gets stuck on the loading bar. You reset it,
it freezes again. You hard reboot, it freezes
again. And it's not just a few people. It is
every single first -generation Zune 30 on the
planet simultaneously. That must have been terrifying.
Did people think it was a virus? A kill switch?
The forums were on fire. People thought Microsoft
had bricked the devices remotely to force them
to buy the new Zune. Panic. Conspiracy theories.
But the reality was much, much dumber. It was
a driver bug. Specifically, the internal clock
driver. It was a piece of code written by a component
supplier called Freescale. The code's job was
to calculate what day of the year it was. In
2008 was a leap year, 366 days. Exactly. The
code had a logic loop. It said essentially, if
days is greater than 365, subtract 365 and add
one to the year. But the way it was written on
the 366th day. It entered an infinite loop. Oh,
no. It kept asking, is it day 366? And the answer
was yes. So it just spun in circles, burning
the processor. The device wasn't broken. It was
just thinking really, really hard about what
day it was. It was an existential crisis for
the microchip. What day is it? It can't be today.
Try again. What day is it? So what was the fix?
Did they have to issue a patch? They couldn't
patch it because the devices wouldn't boot. Microsoft
engineers scrambled, found the bug in the source
code, and then realized the solution was... to
do nothing. Microsoft's official advice was,
wait. You had to let the battery drain completely
so the internal clock would stop. Then, wait
until noon GMT on January 1st, 2009. Why noon?
So that the entire world was safely into the
new day. Once the calendar rolled over naturally
to a non -leap year day, the math worked again.
You recharged it, turned it on, and it was fine.
That is humiliating. It was the final nail in
the coffin for the brand's reputation. Here's
this device that is already the butt of jokes,
and now it can't even tell time on New Year's
Eve. It just reinforced the narrative. Apple
is polish, Microsoft is buggy, Apple works, Zoom
crashes. It became a joke on late night TV. The
Zoom is hungover. And the marketing didn't help.
I remember seeing a website called ComingZoon.
Oh, God. ComingZoon. Spelled C -O -M -I -N -G
-Z -U -N -E. Yeah. It was this weird, artsy,
viral marketing campaign. They tried to create
a grassroots movement. They hired Zoonmasters.
Zoonmasters? What is a Zoonmaster? College campus
reps. They would walk around with Zoons, trying
to act cool, handing out stickers, hosting parties.
But it felt so forced. It felt like a corporation
wearing a backwards baseball cap saying, how
do you do, fellow kids? Authentic cool cannot
be manufactured. You can't buy cool with a marketing
budget. And the retailers smelled blood. By 2008,
GameStop announced they were pulling Zunes from
their shelves. That's a bad sign. When the video
game store, which is arguably your core demographic,
Xbox Gamers, says, we don't want this, you are
in trouble. They cited insufficient demand. The
numbers were brutal. Give us the scorecard. How
bad did it get? Launch week in 2006, they managed
a 9 % unit share. Not terrible, but mostly powered
by initial curiosity and Microsoft loyalists.
Okay, a toehold. A toehold. But it never grew.
At its absolute peak, they maybe hit 10 or 11
percent of the hard drive player market. But
then the slide began. By 2009, the year of the
magnificent Zune HD market share in the U .S.
had fallen to 2 percent. 2 percent. That is a
rounding error. Meanwhile, Apple held 73 percent.
SanDisk, the budget option, was beating Microsoft.
Creative was beating them. In early 2009, Microsoft
reported a $100 million drop in sales revenue
from the previous year. It was a money pit. But
we have to zoom out here. Because even if the
Zoom was perfect, even if it was gold -plated
and made you coffee, it was doomed, wasn't it?
This is the tragedy. Microsoft was fighting a
war for a territory that was sinking into the
ocean. The smartphone. January 2007. Just two
months after the Zoom launches, Steve Jobs walks
on stage and introduces the iPhone. He calls
it a widescreen iPod with touch controls, a revolutionary
mobile phone, and a breakthrough internet communicator.
The widescreen iPod part is the key. The moment
the iPhone existed, the standalone MP3 player
was deadwalking. Why carry a phone in a Zoom
when your phone is an iPod? So Zoom was fighting
for the scraps of a dying industry. Microsoft
was obsessing over how to beat the iPod classic,
while Apple was busy making the iPod irrelevant.
It's a classic case of what Simon Sinek calls
the infinite game. Explain that concept. Cynic
argues that there are finite games and infinite
games. A finite game has rules, a beginning and
an end. The goal is to win. Football is a finite
game. Microsoft was playing a finite game. Beat
the iPod. Right. They looked at Apple specs and
tried to top them. They have 30 jibby. We have
30 jibby. They have a screen. Ours is bigger.
But Apple was playing the infinite game. Right.
The infinite game has no finish line. The goal
is to stay in the game and evolve. Apple wasn't
trying to beat Microsoft's MP3 player. They were
trying to reinvent how humans interact with information.
They cannibalized their own product. They cannibalized
their own golden goose, the iPod, to create the
iPhone. Microsoft wasn't willing to do that yet.
They were protecting the Zune while Apple was
killing the iPod to birth the iPhone. Exactly.
Sinek calls the Zune a triumph of design but
a failure of strategic thinking. They built the
best buggy whip right as the Model T rolled off
the assembly line. So the end comes. When did
they finally pull the plug? It was a slow, painful
fade. March 2011, they announced no new hardware
would be developed. October 2011, officially.
And finally in 2015, the Zune music service was
shut down and users were migrated to Groove Music.
Which nobody used either. Which was also eventually
killed. RIP Zune. But wait, we can't end on the
RIP. Because this is where the story gets really
interesting. This is the legacy part of our deep
dive. The slate theory. The flop that saved Microsoft.
It sounds counterintuitive, doesn't it? How does
a financial disaster save a company? You have
to look at what Windows was in 2006. Windows
XP. Windows Vista. It was gray. It was cluttered.
It was a spreadsheet. It was designed by engineers
for engineers. Bevels, shadows, drop -down menus,
inside drop -down menus. There was no joy in
it. It was work. Then look at the Zune HD interface.
It didn't use icons. It used typography. Big,
bold words. Music, videos, social. The words
were the navigation. You swiped through them.
It was fluid. It was animated. It felt alive.
The content was the hero. This was the birth
of the Metro design language. Yes. They used
a font called Segoe, which Microsoft still uses
today. They prioritized content over Chrome,
meaning the borders and buttons. They realized
that the interface should recede and the content
should come forward. And they took this little
design experiment from the failed music player
and they injected it into the main bloodstream
of Microsoft. It became the interface for Windows
Phone 7. It became the dashboard for the Xbox
360. And eventually it evolved into the tile
interface of Windows 8. The live tiles. Even
today, if you open the start menu in Windows
10 or 11, that clean, flat design, the reliance
on typography, the lack of fake 3D effects, that
can all trace its lineage directly back to the
Zoom team. So in a way, the Zoom died so that
Microsoft could learn how to design. It taught
them that user experience matters, that you can't
just throw features at a user. You have to curate
an experience. Before Zoom, Microsoft was an
engineering company. Zune forced them to become
a design company, at least in their consumer
products. It humanized them. There's also this
funny little lingering ghost of the Zune that
I absolutely love. It involves airplanes. United
Airlines. This is a great trivia nugget. Tell
the listeners about this, because this proves
the brand had a weirdly long half -life. So,
United Airlines had a partnership with Microsoft
to provide the audio for their Inflate Entertainment
systems. You know, the little jack in the armrest
where you plug in the plastic headphones? The
one that always sounds staticky and plays a loop
of classical music. That's the one. Well, long
after the Zune hardware was discontinued, United
kept using the branding. So in 2010, 2011, even
2012, if you were flying to Denver or Chicago,
you were listening to Zune contemporary pop or
Zune piano jazz. That is fantastic. A zombie
brand cruising at 30 ,000 feet. While the devices
were gathering dust in pawn shops, the brand
was flying high. It just shows how deep the corporate
deals went. And the software lived on, too, right?
The Zune desktop software, which, frankly, was
much better than iTunes on Windows, became the
sync tool for Windows Phone. If you bought an
early Windows phone, you had to use Zune software
to manage it. I remember that. So for a few years,
Zune was the gateway to Microsoft's mobile strategy.
So it really was the bridge. It was the bridge
from old Microsoft to modern Microsoft. It was
the necessary failure. Sometimes you have to
fall on your face to learn how to run. Jay Allard
and his team taught Microsoft that they could
make something beautiful, even if they couldn't
sell it. So as we wrap this up, I want to pose
a what -if scenario. Because we talked about
the Zune Pass, the subscription model. Microsoft
had the rights. They had the catalog. They had
the streaming tech. They had it all. But they
locked it to the Zune hardware. You had to buy
the brown brick to get the service. Correct.
That was their fatal error. Imagine if in 2008
or 2009, Microsoft had said, you know what? We
aren't going to beat the iPhone with hardware.
Let's put the Zune Pass app on the iPhone. That
is the multi -billion dollar question. If they
had launched a cross -platform music subscription
service four years before Spotify launched in
the U .S., would we be using Zune instead of
Spotify today? It is very, very possible. They
had the infrastructure. They had the Head Start.
They had the artist relationships. But they were
blinded by the hardware envy. They wanted a cool
gadget. They wanted to be Apple so bad that they
forgot they were Microsoft, a software company.
They missed the forest for the trees. Or the
cloud for the brick. They insisted on selling
the box when they should have been selling the
service. If they had pivoted to services just
a few years earlier, Zune could be the biggest
music platform in the world right now. And that,
my friends, is the tragedy of the Zune. A brilliant
service trapped inside a misunderstood... occasionally
frozen box. A box that was ahead of its time
but just couldn't tell the time. Exactly. So
the next time you see that punchline on TV or
you see a picture of a Zune, don't just laugh.
Pour one out for the squircle. It deserves a
little respect. It really does. Thanks for taking
this deep dive with us. It's been a trip down
memory lane. A brown, double -shot injection,
molded memory lane. The best kind. Thanks for
listening, everyone. We'll catch you on the next
deep dive.