UNINNOVATE / Engineering At Its Finest

The motto for Microsoft’s Zune mp3 player, its supposed iPod-killer, is “Welcome to the Social.” According to Brandweek, Microsoft is spending over $100 million on the “Welcome to the Social” advertising campaign to promote the Zune. With that kind of money invested, it would be helpful if the device lived up to the ads.

The key “social” feature of the Zune is the ability to for one Zune user to send songs to another user via a wireless connection. However, this feature is entangled with several restrictions:

• Audio files (songs, podcasts, etc.) transferred from one Zune to another can be played for up to three days or three plays, whichever comes first, after which it expires unless purchased or downloaded via the Zune Marketplace online.
• Recipients cannot re-send music or audio files that they have received via the sharing feature.
• Some DRM-protected songs are ineligible for sharing, as record companies can flag songs from the Zune Marketplace as “non-distributable”.

Wikipedia: Microsoft Zune

While the practicality of finding other Zune users in close proximity who have music and want to share is questionable enough, it appears it won’t do much good anyway. According to testing performed by Zunerama.com and ZuneThoughts.com, around 40%-50% of music falls under the “ineligible for sharing” limitation. Worse still, there is no way for the user to know what songs they are allowed to share until they try to share it.

So to summarize, a Zune user can join the social revolution by simply:

1. Finding another Zune user in the same room
2. Finding out if that user has music they are interested in
3. Be willing to live with a copy of that music that will only play three times
4. Be willing to step through the awkward process of transmitting the songs from one Zune to another
5. Not mind that 40% to 50% of the songs copied will fail due to “sharing limitations”

Yeah, Microsoft, this “social” thing sounds great. It’s amazing you aren’t selling more of these Zune things.