- 7 weeks ago
In 2006, Microsoft came for the iPod's throne with an innovative MP3 player called the Zune. It had a bunch of features the iPod didn't: WiFi, music sharing, a bigger screen, a beautiful UI, even an FM radio. And to hear Microsoft describe it, it was even kind of a social network. Nilay Patel and Victoria Song join David Pierce to break down why, despite all that, the Zune never really took off. And why it came in brown.
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TechTranscript
00:00:00It's the early 2000s, and all you want to do is listen to some music.
00:00:04Best case scenario, you have the money to afford an iPod,
00:00:07and the even more money to afford songs at 99 cents apiece.
00:00:10Worst case scenario, you have like a MP3 player with a dying hard drive
00:00:14that you are desperately trying to keep alive.
00:00:16Maybe you're running around with a binder full of CDs like it's the 90s.
00:00:20Well, I have a better answer.
00:00:21It's a new device from Microsoft, and it lets you play music,
00:00:25listen to the radio, watch videos, look at pictures,
00:00:27and even share stuff with your friends.
00:00:30It's called the Zune, and it is going to kill the iPod.
00:00:33From The Verge and Vox Media, this is Version History,
00:00:36a show about the best and worst and strangest and most important products in tech history.
00:00:42Today, we're talking music and all of the ways the Zune did not, in fact, kill the iPod.
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00:01:29All right, we're back. Let's talk Zune.
00:01:31V song is here. V, hello.
00:01:32Hello.
00:01:33Nilay Patel is here. Nilay, hello.
00:01:35Hello.
00:01:35Two very different Zune experiences in the room, which I'm very excited about.
00:01:39Did either of you have the first Zune?
00:01:41No, I was too poor.
00:01:43Did you want the first Zune?
00:01:44I did want one.
00:01:46Yeah.
00:01:46Yes, because, so Zune comes out 2006.
00:01:49I'm a young, bushy-eyed 18-year-old flying off to Tokyo to do the next seven years in Tokyo.
00:01:56My iPod, the one with the video, was a piece of, I had dropped it so much.
00:02:03That thing was expensive, too. That's tough.
00:02:05So, you know, I wanted something that was different.
00:02:08Like, I had my, I really did not like iTunes back then.
00:02:11I still don't.
00:02:12I was going to say, and then that never changed ever.
00:02:14iTunes was never good.
00:02:15So, you know, my audio.
00:02:16We're already beefing.
00:02:19iTunes was a perfect piece of software.
00:02:22Like, 2006 iTunes.
00:02:24Absolutely not.
00:02:24Perfect piece of software.
00:02:26No.
00:02:27Anywho, yeah, so, like, my audiophile friends were all, like, into the Zune, and they had it,
00:02:32and I was like, oh, it's brown.
00:02:34That's special.
00:02:35And then the interface looked cool, and it had the cool typeface, and I was like, oh,
00:02:40I would love to have one, but I'm poor.
00:02:42At least you had an iPod.
00:02:43I had, like, a creative zen something or other that was, like, a spinning hard drive inside
00:02:50of a box about, you know, the size of two hands.
00:02:53Oh, you were fancy.
00:02:54You had a hard drive.
00:02:54Oh, yeah, it was a whole thing.
00:02:56I went for the big one.
00:02:57It was either get a mini disc player.
00:02:58Then they looked like a fake CD player.
00:03:00Uh-huh.
00:03:00Yeah.
00:03:01But they just played the tiny little ones, and you could, there was one that you could
00:03:03strap on your belt.
00:03:04Yeah.
00:03:04That was awesome.
00:03:05I wanted that.
00:03:05Couldn't afford that.
00:03:06So, I got, like, a used, literally, it was the size of, like, I don't know, like an iPad.
00:03:12And that was my MP3 player.
00:03:15I had a Rio.
00:03:16Okay.
00:03:16The little purple one that was, like, ergonomic, so you could, like, hold it.
00:03:20Oh, yeah.
00:03:21You know, it was, like, it was shaped.
00:03:23Was that the one that had the tiny little horizontal screen on it?
00:03:25It was, like, a horizontal screen, but it was inside of an oval that was slanted.
00:03:29It was, right, so they tried to fake the way it looked.
00:03:31But, like, inside it was just another segmented LCD screen.
00:03:34And it held approximately 10 songs.
00:03:36Because it was, like, SD cards or whatever.
00:03:39It was great.
00:03:39I loved it.
00:03:39So, you and I both brought Zunes today.
00:03:42Mine, I just bought.
00:03:44I bought a brown iPod on eBay.
00:03:47Was this your Zune, like, your OG Zune?
00:03:49Or did you buy this one for the show?
00:03:50No, I bought it on eBay for the show.
00:03:51It was $59.
00:03:53Wow.
00:03:53And I've spent a lot of time trying to decide if I got a good deal or a terrible deal.
00:03:57You know, it retained a surprising amount of its value for being a 20, almost 20-year-old device.
00:04:03Right?
00:04:03Yeah.
00:04:04I was going to say it retained a surprising amount of its brown.
00:04:06It's still very brown.
00:04:07It's still super brown.
00:04:09And I just want to say genuine kudos to whoever, like, had this thing before me.
00:04:13They have, I mean, there's, like, thousands of songs on here.
00:04:16And whoever it is has, like, pretty sick music taste.
00:04:18Do that.
00:04:19But I would like to read you a complete list of the playlists on this Zune that I bought on eBay.
00:04:23It powers up.
00:04:24I mean, I'm impressed.
00:04:25It turns on.
00:04:26It works.
00:04:27No battery swirling, no nothing.
00:04:28No.
00:04:28What's the charger?
00:04:30It is Microsoft's version of the 30-pin charger.
00:04:34Oh, God.
00:04:34It's good stuff.
00:04:35There's one playlist called Christian Songs.
00:04:38We have Christmas.
00:04:40We have Easter.
00:04:41We have First.
00:04:43And we have Zune Gems.
00:04:44Zune Gems.
00:04:45And there are, like, 30 songs in Zune Gems, and I have never heard of any of them.
00:04:50What's in the Easter list?
00:04:51What's in the First list?
00:04:53Oh, my gosh.
00:04:54There's so many options.
00:04:56It takes forever to scroll around this thing.
00:04:59Easter and Christmas are empty, which is very bleak and sad.
00:05:03So, one thing I want to point out here is David struggling to use the interface of the Zune.
00:05:08Oh, this is brutal.
00:05:09I'm assuming only hardcore Zune nerds are going to listen to this episode of Version History.
00:05:13But if for some reason you've stumbled into it, the innovation of the iPod was the wheel.
00:05:20By far, this was the big innovation.
00:05:22And the first iPod had a literal mechanical wheel that you would turn to scroll up and down the menus.
00:05:26Phil Schiller, this was his idea at Apple.
00:05:28And Apple had a patent on it, and then they had a patent on the click wheel, which is where the iPod ended up.
00:05:33This is crazy.
00:05:34This is all, if you think about it.
00:05:35Fun fact, V picked the brown Zune up off my desk this morning, and the very first thing she says is,
00:05:40oh, I forgot it didn't have a click wheel.
00:05:41I forgot, I just, muscle memory.
00:05:4420-year-old muscle memory just going.
00:05:46I was like, why no scroll?
00:05:48Oh.
00:05:49Right.
00:05:49Right.
00:05:49It's the defining interface element of that time, as Apple invented the click wheel.
00:05:54Microsoft couldn't use it because Apple had a patent on it, so they made it a circle,
00:05:58and it's a swipey touch circle.
00:06:01And it has the exact problem that Apple solved with the click wheel, which is that it's slow.
00:06:05Yep.
00:06:06And they just ran right into it being slow.
00:06:09And it's also, it's a very left-right interface.
00:06:12Yeah.
00:06:12So there's like, it has like a menu at the top where you go across all the different kinds of like filters and music and all that stuff,
00:06:17and then it goes up and down as you scroll stuff.
00:06:19But then you go to the home screen, which is up and down.
00:06:21It's like trying to map the interface of the Zune is insanity.
00:06:25Yeah.
00:06:25That said, I go to the home screen, and you mentioned the typeface.
00:06:28The typeface.
00:06:29Oh, yeah.
00:06:29Lovely.
00:06:29Very pretty.
00:06:30Lots and lots of Zune persists to this day across the entire industry.
00:06:33Yeah.
00:06:34The Zune design became a lot of what Windows became, and then eventually what everything became.
00:06:39There's lots to the Zune that's good, but it's just very funny that they ran headfirst into the problem that Apple solved with the click wheel.
00:06:46Yeah.
00:06:47And, Neila, you also brought a Zune.
00:06:48I brought a Zune.
00:06:49A special, special Zune.
00:06:50A very special Zune.
00:06:52Da-da-da-da.
00:06:52So, this is a period of weird exclusives across the industry.
00:06:56Somehow, the Zune team decided that what would save the Zune in 2008 is producing 500 limited edition Joy Division Zunes.
00:07:08You know, Joy Division.
00:07:09I bought one.
00:07:09Famously the biggest band in the world.
00:07:11Everyone has a T-shirt.
00:07:12Very few people have the records.
00:07:14It's like basically how that goes.
00:07:15So, they were like, we're just going to put the Unknown Pleasure sticker on a Zune, and then people will be confused, and they'll buy that.
00:07:21But then we have to make it real.
00:07:22So, they hired Peter Saville, who was Joy Division and the Order's, like, main designer, to design the whole thing.
00:07:30It is, I have it.
00:07:31And I'm just saying that he designed the whole thing because I don't have a Joy Division Zune.
00:07:37To properly preserve it, you have to have the box it shipped in because it's so outrageous.
00:07:44So, I have the whole thing.
00:07:46This is the box that arrived.
00:07:47So, you got this in 2008.
00:07:50In 2008, this is the box that arrived at my apartment in Chicago.
00:07:53It is huge.
00:07:54This is, like, fine jewelry that we're opening.
00:07:56This is fine jewelry.
00:07:57And then you pull out the actual Joy Division Zune.
00:07:59This is a Zune 80.
00:08:00It's, like, the second generation.
00:08:01I have number 154500.
00:08:04I've never taken the sticker off.
00:08:05I've never turned it on.
00:08:06But it has the full Joy Division catalog on it.
00:08:08It says, warning, explicit content on it, which is deeply hilarious.
00:08:12And on the back, again, the Unknown Pleasure logo, it says, Peter Saville for Joy Division, the documentary limited edition.
00:08:17And it's just a Zune 80.
00:08:19Oh, see, this is nice.
00:08:20My brown one is, like, kind of plasticky and gross.
00:08:23This one is, like—
00:08:24The Zune 80 was really, really nice.
00:08:25You could beat somebody up with this thing.
00:08:26I have not looked on eBay to see how much it's worth now.
00:08:29Will you—
00:08:29Let's do this.
00:08:30Will you just look on eBay for Joy Division Zune?
00:08:32What do you think it's worth now?
00:08:34The last time I looked, they were trending between $500 and $1,000.
00:08:37Oh, and how much did you pay for it?
00:08:40I paid the list price.
00:08:41It was probably, like, $350 or something.
00:08:43Okay, I have found one for sale.
00:08:45It is $2,099.
00:08:48And there are 33 watchers.
00:08:50There you go.
00:08:50Oh, my God.
00:08:51People want this stuff.
00:08:52I don't—
00:08:53You going to sell it?
00:08:54Is it worth it?
00:08:55We'll see.
00:08:55We're going to wait for it to keep—
00:08:57I mean, you have it, though, in the original packaging.
00:09:00Yeah, that's true.
00:09:01Unopened.
00:09:02With the sticker on it.
00:09:02Unturned on with the sticker on it.
00:09:03Who knows if this battery works.
00:09:04I feel like there's, like, a 40% chance this is you just trying to, like—
00:09:07You're on my Pinterest for your own eBay listing.
00:09:10Finally, you've caught me.
00:09:11I am eBayboy29.
00:09:14Love that for you.
00:09:15So, all right.
00:09:16So, let's go back and tell some sort of Zune history here.
00:09:20Yeah.
00:09:20I did way more research for this than I needed to and found that basically none of this story was what I expected.
00:09:27So, I'm curious if this all matches what y'all remember because it's not what I remember.
00:09:31But I think we have to go back to, like, 2003 just to, like, set the scene a little bit.
00:09:36But at this point, Apple, obviously, is, like, dominant.
00:09:40There are a lot of other MP3 players out there, but Apple is, like, the one.
00:09:44The stat I found was that Apple had somewhere between half and 75% of the digital media player market and 70% of digital music sales.
00:09:53So, like, it was winning.
00:09:542004 was also the first anniversary of the iTunes store, which was later than I remembered for all of that happening.
00:10:04iTunes was going very well.
00:10:062004, Apple launches the fourth-gen iPod and the iPod Mini.
00:10:09They had click wheels.
00:10:11Microsoft, at this point, has nothing.
00:10:12Just nothing.
00:10:13Well, no.
00:10:13They had Windows Media Store.
00:10:17Like, they had launched a store.
00:10:19But there was MSN Music.
00:10:20MSN Music, but they had launched, like, a DRM store with a bunch of music labels.
00:10:24And they were trying to do a very Microsoft thing.
00:10:27Yeah.
00:10:28Right?
00:10:28Which is, like, we're not going to make anything.
00:10:31We're going to let other stores use our DRM and then an ecosystem of players and software will interface with Windows.
00:10:40Then that will be good.
00:10:41And in a very different world than the one that the iPod totally dominated, that, like, could have maybe possibly made sense.
00:10:47But it, like, immediately didn't seem to work.
00:10:49But just in setting the scene, I have two clips I want to play for you.
00:10:52The first is from G4 TV doing a comparison of the best MP3 players on the market.
00:11:00And I would just like to play this for you.
00:11:02Okay.
00:11:02Well, a posse of new-gen sharpshooters have just arrived and they're looking to take over.
00:11:07Now, as they say, this town ain't big enough for two of them.
00:11:09But the iPod ain't going out without a fight.
00:11:13Which can only mean a showdown.
00:11:15This newcomer from Bantam, he's only packing a measly two gigs.
00:11:22As for this Philips HDD100.
00:11:24I said he's like a slower than a horse in mud.
00:11:29Spoiler alert, the iPod wins.
00:11:31That wasn't even the good iPod.
00:11:33That was the weird third gen with the red buttons over the wheel.
00:11:35Yeah.
00:11:36And then the other one I want to play for you is Steve Jobs.
00:11:39This is the introduction of the iPod Mini in 2004.
00:11:43And he did the thing he always does where he, like, puts up all the ugly ones on a screen and then explains why theirs is better.
00:11:48And he kind of inadvertently perfectly describes the MP3 player market.
00:11:51So let's just check this out.
00:11:53The high-end flash players, if you pay $200, they hold about 60 songs.
00:11:58If you pay close to $100, they hold 30 songs.
00:12:01And people either do one of two things.
00:12:02They either get a new memory card for it or they put it in the drawer and don't use it.
00:12:07They also have a really bad user interface.
00:12:10Well, we are going to introduce the second member of the iPod family today to go after these guys.
00:12:20And it's called the iPod Mini.
00:12:26Kind of a fair description.
00:12:27Like, Steve Jobs, good salesman, but he's not lying about what was going on.
00:12:31Like, you had either these, like, you were either on CDs or you had mini discs or you had, like, flash drives or you had, like, I did spinning hard drives because that was fancy.
00:12:38I didn't know that was fancy until just now.
00:12:41But it's, like, it's the iPod and then mess for, like, years.
00:12:45And then simultaneously, Microsoft has launched the Xbox, which worked.
00:12:49And it's, like, Microsoft's kind of first real consumer hit.
00:12:53And so Microsoft is, like, okay.
00:12:54I would say Windows PCs were a consumer hit.
00:12:56Sure.
00:12:56But it's, like, it's a hardware product that Microsoft did all on its own.
00:13:01It was the, like, most Apple-y consumer product it had made that people liked.
00:13:05And so within Microsoft, there's this sense of, like, okay, there's more we can do here.
00:13:10We can blow this out.
00:13:10This is, like, a thing we know how to do.
00:13:12We're going to go be a huge consumer company, which is the longest-running theme I can think of inside of Microsoft.
00:13:18Like, every two years, they're, like, we are a consumer company.
00:13:21Would you like to use Microsoft Teams?
00:13:23And it's, like, guys.
00:13:24No.
00:13:24I will never like to use Microsoft Teams for the record.
00:13:28The Xbox is really interesting in this context as well, because it was a Skunkworks project led by an executive named Jay Allard, who basically was allowed to not use Windows.
00:13:38You're just reading my notes for me.
00:13:39Guess who takes over the Zune project?
00:13:41Our boy Jay Allard.
00:13:42Yeah.
00:13:43So, Jay Allard, they start working internally on a project called Zune with Toshiba, which had been making these devices.
00:13:52Do you remember a thing called the Gigabit?
00:13:54This was an MP3 player.
00:13:55I'm confident that I wrote about the Gigabit in my end game.
00:13:58I've got nothing on Gigabit.
00:14:00This video, I think, is from Toshiba's booth at CES in 2006 when the Gigabit came out.
00:14:06This is the only place that video came out.
00:14:07Yeah, I think that's right.
00:14:09Let me just quickly play you a commercial of the Gigabit, see if it jogs your memory.
00:14:16Yes!
00:14:16This is the most 1990s thing you've ever seen.
00:14:19Yeah!
00:14:20Get your beat going.
00:14:21This is great.
00:14:23People doing handstands.
00:14:24Where was this ad meant to run?
00:14:26I don't know.
00:14:26I've been transported.
00:14:29To make a list of file formats right next to a guy doing a headstand?
00:14:33I don't know what this is.
00:14:39That's a Zune.
00:14:40That's what you're telling me.
00:14:41Yeah.
00:14:41Oh my god.
00:14:42This device is the basis of the...
00:14:44Yeah.
00:14:444,000 photos.
00:14:49Right in the butt.
00:14:51All right.
00:14:51Okay.
00:14:52All right.
00:14:52You get the idea.
00:14:54I'm not sure I get the idea because we've ended on the words cool design ultra.
00:14:58Cool design ultra.
00:15:01Look at that Windows button.
00:15:02See that Windows button?
00:15:03Yes.
00:15:03This is what I mean.
00:15:05Microsoft was building this like weird ecosystem around its operating system.
00:15:10And the idea was that all of these devices would work with it.
00:15:13And it just never happened.
00:15:15This software was called Portable Media Center.
00:15:17Yeah.
00:15:17I love that.
00:15:18And if there was a piece of software that was ever not going to make it, it's Windows Portable Media Center.
00:15:23One thing that's really interesting because this is the turn for Jay Allard.
00:15:27This is like fragmentation and ecosystem like craziness at its highest peak.
00:15:34Microsoft was like, we'll make the software.
00:15:36Everyone else can make the hardware.
00:15:37Someone else will make the service.
00:15:39And we'll just sit there and collect taxes from everyone because everyone has to run Windows.
00:15:43And this worked to some extent with Windows.
00:15:46And it never worked here.
00:15:48And for years, Steve Jobs would say, no, you have to integrate everything.
00:15:52And I think what Microsoft let Jay Allard do was take runs at integrating the products.
00:15:57Right?
00:15:58That's the Xbox.
00:15:58That's exactly right.
00:15:59So the one last fun fact about the Gigabit.
00:16:022006, CES, Bill Gates gets up on stage and launches this thing.
00:16:07In the course of doing other stuff, but this was like a meaningful announcement for Microsoft.
00:16:11But so as they're launching this with this video,
00:16:15Microsoft and Toshiba are also working behind the scenes to absolutely just kill this.
00:16:20Which is the most Microsoft-y thing.
00:16:22Imagine just being the cracked out, like, Circuit City shopper's agent who, like, watched this video.
00:16:26And I was like, that's it.
00:16:27That's it.
00:16:28Like a month later, like, I was super wrong.
00:16:31Yeah.
00:16:31So this thing comes out.
00:16:33And then literally over the course of 2006, it becomes increasingly very obvious that Microsoft is making some –
00:16:38Everybody starts calling it an iPod killer, right?
00:16:40Like, that's the thing.
00:16:41It's obvious that Microsoft wants to do this.
00:16:44The Zune originally leaked through the FCC as the Toshiba 1089.
00:16:48Oh, yeah.
00:16:48But for some reason, everybody instantly understood that this was Microsoft's thing.
00:16:53This was like – it was so clear this is what was coming.
00:16:55This is a time in Gadget history.
00:16:56I was at – and Gadget then.
00:16:58And we would publish these FCC filings.
00:17:00They actually – because there were so many leaks that came out of the FCC, there was a rule change made at the FCC so companies could keep their filings more secret for longer.
00:17:09Oh, wow.
00:17:09Like, this is the height of Gadget plugging, right?
00:17:12The iPod's out.
00:17:13Digital cameras are having a moment.
00:17:15Like, gadgets as a category have not yet been subsumed into phones.
00:17:20And, like, Microsoft is doing an iPod killer was like, there's nothing better than this.
00:17:25Like, every day we wake up and we're like, here's one more lick of information about the Microsoft iPod killer.
00:17:30So, this is my favorite part, is in June of 2006, Microsoft says on the record specifically, it is not planning on making an iPod killer.
00:17:41And a month later, it launches the zoo as it starts telling everybody that it's doing an iPod killer.
00:17:48And apparently, all the other companies, the Toshibas and creatives of the world, were pissed about this.
00:17:52Because as soon as this came out, all their partners who had been working on this software and building stuff on these platforms were totally blindsided.
00:18:00And this is such a, like, classic big tech company story.
00:18:04Like, I thought so much about the Google Pixel history in thinking about this, where you're like, oh, we built this big platform.
00:18:09Everybody's super invested in it.
00:18:10We convinced them all to not make their own software and use ours instead.
00:18:13And now we're going to launch a flagship device.
00:18:15So, this is, again, having the big ecosystem versus the integrated product.
00:18:19It comes up over and over again.
00:18:21And what's interesting is Microsoft is always at the center of this debate.
00:18:24Is Microsoft going to make its own PCs?
00:18:26Well, eventually, they had to, because the ecosystem made everything cheap and crappy and lost to Apple at the high end of the market.
00:18:33So, they had to hire one guy, Panos Panay, to go and fix it.
00:18:36There's a really famous email from Bill Gates around the time of the iTunes store, where Bill Gates is like, why do we suck?
00:18:42Like, basically, it's like one of the greatest emails in tech history, where he's just like, how did this happen to me again?
00:18:48Yeah.
00:18:48Can I actually just read you this entire email?
00:18:49Bill Gates is very good at email.
00:18:52So, this is April 30th of 2003 at 1046 p.m.
00:18:56Wow.
00:18:56Do with that whatever you will.
00:18:571046.
00:18:58That's deliberate.
00:18:59And there are, let's see, one, two, three, four, five, six, seven people on this email, which is a lot.
00:19:05It says, Steve Jobs' ability to focus in on a few things that count, get people who get user interface right, and market things as revolutionary are amazing things.
00:19:12This time, somehow, he has applied his talents in getting a better licensing deal than anyone else has gotten from music.
00:19:17This is very strange to me.
00:19:18The music company's own operations offer a service that is truly unfriendly to the user and has been reviewed that way consistently.
00:19:25Somehow, they decide to give Apple the ability to do something pretty good.
00:19:28I remember discussing eMusic and us saying that that model was better than subscription because you would know what you were getting.
00:19:34With the subscription, who can promise you that the cool new stuff you want or old stuff will be there?
00:19:38I'm not saying this strangest means we messed up.
00:19:40At least, if we did so, so did Reel and Press Play and MusicNet and basically everybody else.
00:19:45Spoiler alert, they all messed up.
00:19:46Now that Jobs has done it, we need to move fast to get something where the UI and rights are as good.
00:19:52I'm not sure whether we should do this through one of these JVs or not.
00:19:55Joint Ventures.
00:19:56Yeah, there you go.
00:19:56Which is, I think, where the Toshiba thing starts to happen.
00:19:59I'm not sure what the problems are.
00:20:00However, I think we need some plan to prove that even though Jobs has us a bit flat-footed again, we move quick and both match and do stuff better.
00:20:07I'm sure people have a lot of thoughts on this.
00:20:09If the plan is clear, no meeting is needed.
00:20:10I want to make sure we are coordinated between Windows DMD, MSN, and other groups.
00:20:14And that's how you know it's like death.
00:20:15It's so mad.
00:20:16Yeah.
00:20:16Like, I want to make sure I'm coordinated between the multiple silos in my company that hate each other.
00:20:21But the whole plan here is just, this is literally, this is April of 2003.
00:20:25This is the beginning of this whole thing.
00:20:26And he's just like, I don't know what to do, but we have to do the Apple thing.
00:20:29Yeah.
00:20:29That's it.
00:20:30That's the whole line here.
00:20:33But anyway, so fast forward, we're back.
00:20:34It's the summer of 2006.
00:20:36So it's taken them three years.
00:20:38Yeah.
00:20:38There's three years here.
00:20:39And they are just starting to tell the world that they are building an iPod killer.
00:20:44And I just, I want to read you some quotes from two things that I found.
00:20:48One is a billboard interview that Chris Stevenson, who was the GM of marketing for MSN Entertainment,
00:20:53and he said, the ability to connect the different devices is a key part of the strategy.
00:20:57Whether it's a portable media device or a phone or the Xbox or Media Center PC,
00:21:01the idea is you can access your entertainment from anywhere.
00:21:03He also said it's going to be, quote, a family of hardware and software.
00:21:06Like, Zune was not a media player.
00:21:08Zune was like an entertainment universe that Microsoft was trying to build.
00:21:14Keyword trying.
00:21:15Or at least one marketing guy said in one interview.
00:21:18Let me give you another one.
00:21:20This is Robbie Bach, who ran the entertainment and devices division for Microsoft.
00:21:24He's the guy overseeing all of the parts that put this all together.
00:21:26He did a presentation to financial analysts in July.
00:21:29So this is after it comes out.
00:21:30He's talking to all the money people, and he says, Microsoft will be involved in the hardware, the software, and the services.
00:21:36We think that's important to produce the number one thing that has to happen in this marketplace, which is a great customer experience.
00:21:40And we have to tie those things together in some ways, like we have in the Xbox world,
00:21:44where the hardware software and Xbox Live service, we have tied things together.
00:21:46So again, all of this is tying stuff together.
00:21:50And then he goes, and that's why Zune is important, and it is a way we're going to differentiate ourselves,
00:21:54because the experience of having Zune in that connected environment is going to be a dramatically better experience than you get just from having a portable music player.
00:22:02Like, the ambition is like as big as the world here.
00:22:05They're like, we're going to build everything, and it's all going to be called Zune.
00:22:09But this is like, the vision here is huge.
00:22:12And it was like the Zune was supposed to be the first thing in this, like, I think the way I've come to understand it is like the sort of device ecosystem Apple ended up building
00:22:21between like the iPod and the iPhone and the iPad and sort of all the services that wrap around them is like, that's just all right here.
00:22:29Like, that's the stuff Microsoft was trying to do.
00:22:31And it was going to be Zune.
00:22:33That was the thing.
00:22:33Like, Bill Gates came to CS every year.
00:22:35This is when CS was like a really big deal.
00:22:38And he would give the keynote, and he would basically be like, we're going to put a PC in your living room.
00:22:43And so they applied that same strategy to personal media, portable media center.
00:22:47Well, they tried to make it social, which I think is really fascinating.
00:22:49And I think that like one of the Zune features we're going to talk about is the thing where you could send music to people.
00:22:55But they like really understood the network effects of making this stuff sort of cross-human.
00:23:02In a way that like the iPod just wasn't, like none of these MP3 players were like social devices.
00:23:07Like you had yours and you'd hand it to other people.
00:23:09But like you having an iPad didn't make my iPod more interesting.
00:23:12This was the age of mixtapes and CD burning.
00:23:15Right, exactly.
00:23:16And your friend writing little messages and Sharpie on the little thing.
00:23:20And I just opened like a CD case from that time period not that long ago.
00:23:25And it was like my best friend from high school, who's still my best friend today, just going like, 4V.
00:23:31Yeah.
00:23:31Love A.
00:23:32And I was like, oh my God.
00:23:34Do you remember the smell of burning a CD?
00:23:36Yes.
00:23:36Oh, yeah.
00:23:37It's very visceral.
00:23:38It's gone.
00:23:39It's just like you will never smell that again.
00:23:41Yeah.
00:23:41But yeah, that was the time, right?
00:23:43Apple understood that music was intensely personal.
00:23:46And Microsoft thought of music as a way to get a PC in your living room.
00:23:50And like just like radically different approaches to this whole ecosystem.
00:23:54But like if you boil all of that down, it is the right idea.
00:23:58Right.
00:23:58And I think Microsoft's whole problem has been it can't figure out how to make products for regular humans.
00:24:04That remains its problem today.
00:24:06But I think like it was just fascinating to me to see all of this.
00:24:08And it's like, OK, this is 2006.
00:24:11And Microsoft is like the big 30,000 foot idea was the right one.
00:24:15Yeah.
00:24:15Like what if we make all this stuff social?
00:24:16What if we connect it all?
00:24:17What if we become as much a sort of consumer services business as anything else?
00:24:23It kind of worked.
00:24:24Just not for Microsoft.
00:24:26But the other thing that I found is that there was a real interest in the Zune early on from labels.
00:24:34Because they wanted leverage over Apple.
00:24:36Which at that point was so powerful and so big that all these labels which had like really appreciated what Apple brought.
00:24:43Which was the like better than privacy or better than piracy experience was too powerful.
00:24:50And there was a sense that like we need to have some leverage back.
00:24:52Right.
00:24:53They wanted more of a cut.
00:24:54They wanted variable pricing in the iTunes store.
00:24:56So they wanted songs.
00:24:58I think eventually they got it.
00:24:59Where some songs to be 79 cents and some songs to be $1.29.
00:25:03Right.
00:25:03So they wanted the ability to do pricing like they could do in stores.
00:25:05And then what they really wanted which Apple never gave them.
00:25:09What they really wanted was a cut of every iPod sold.
00:25:12And Sony desperately wanted this.
00:25:15Like desperately desperately wanted a little bit of every iPod sold.
00:25:19Like a little just a little cut off the top.
00:25:21And they thought that if they could build up the Zune or whoever else they would have the leverage to go get this.
00:25:27You know who got that deal?
00:25:28Microsoft.
00:25:29Of course.
00:25:29Microsoft offered that deal.
00:25:30Yeah.
00:25:30So it was UMG in particular, Universal Media Group, that picked that fight and won it.
00:25:35And so one of Microsoft's deal was to give hardware revenues with labels and artists.
00:25:40Fascinating.
00:25:41Didn't work.
00:25:42But I have a really great quote from, this is Doug Morris, who was the CEO and chairman of UMG at the time.
00:25:48He said, these devices are just repositories for stolen music and they all know it.
00:25:51So it's time to get paid for it.
00:25:52That's really what this is about.
00:25:54Yep.
00:25:54Like that is just, that's the music industry side of this whole story.
00:25:57They're like, we want somebody other than Apple to be big so that we can make everybody pay us more money.
00:26:03Kind of worked.
00:26:04And then, so Microsoft made that deal with UMG and then said it would make the same deal with other labels too.
00:26:10But UMG at that point was like leading the charge.
00:26:13Yeah.
00:26:13So one other moment in the run up to this that I thought was really interesting is on August 1st of 2006,
00:26:19the New York Post runs a story that like panics everybody in all of this.
00:26:23Because again, we're in this moment where like lots of information is out.
00:26:25Product hasn't launched.
00:26:26Still don't know a lot of details.
00:26:28And this story essentially said that Microsoft was A, planning to delay the video stuff that it was going to do on its iPod killer,
00:26:36which made people nervous because video was supposed to be one of the like big reasons to get something that is in an iPod.
00:26:41And then the other thing, Microsoft was telling the entertainment industry that one of the things it was going to do was give away music and support it with ads.
00:26:49And people did not like this.
00:26:52They hated it.
00:26:52Like the entertainment industry is like absolutely not like Microsoft is trying to get away from the, especially in video,
00:26:59the like get pay for episodes of TV shows or pay for a movie or whatever.
00:27:05And they wanted to just essentially do a streaming thing, right?
00:27:09We're like, we're going to be a free streaming service and we're going to support it with ads.
00:27:11And all the same people who really wanted competition for the iPod did not want competition among ad buyers.
00:27:18And so it became, this became a whole thing and people started to freak out and they're like, okay, Microsoft is blowing up this model that they've promised this is going to be better for us.
00:27:25It turned out it was fine.
00:27:27Because it didn't work.
00:27:28It didn't work.
00:27:28It is a fun counter theory of like, what if Microsoft did like, what if the Zune had like really hit?
00:27:33A lot of what you're describing here is Microsoft being so early to good ideas that they couldn't execute them.
00:27:38The Zune had Wi-Fi, but it wasn't streaming, right?
00:27:43It was just for sync on your own local network and it killed the battery.
00:27:46So all of this, like we're going to do ad stuff was you had to sync your Zune and then it would like download ads to your Zune.
00:27:54It's just like, none of this is correct.
00:27:57And then you, you know, fast forward later and Spotify is like dynamic ad insertion and like they can do all this stuff because it's streaming it instead of transferring it to big computers.
00:28:05Right, yeah, this whole set of stuff that works on over the internet doesn't work.
00:28:09Like the cloud does not exist.
00:28:11Microsoft, Microsoft has never gotten a sense of timing, like to save its life.
00:28:16It's always too late or too early to something.
00:28:18It's never, it's never just on time.
00:28:21Yeah.
00:28:21Which is sad.
00:28:22We should take a break here and then we're going to get to the launch and what happened after.
00:28:26But first, I just want to commend Microsoft because it launched a website saying our product is coming soon.
00:28:32And it was comingzoom.com.
00:28:34Oh, yeah.
00:28:34And I think that's very good.
00:28:36And I also would just like to play you the very first Zune ad, which started as a video at the bottom of that website.
00:28:44And if either of you can explain to me what this ad is and why it exists, I'd really love that.
00:28:50Challenge accepted.
00:28:51Oh, boy.
00:28:52Oh, I accepted too soon.
00:28:55This is that really twee 2006 era.
00:28:57Oh, my God.
00:28:58You know?
00:28:58Is that like a bee?
00:28:59Oh, it's a bird.
00:29:00It's two little birds.
00:29:01It's a bird.
00:29:02Oh, no.
00:29:04Yeah.
00:29:04And one of them just catches fire.
00:29:06It's on fire and headbanging.
00:29:09Oh, no.
00:29:12Wow.
00:29:13Oh, no.
00:29:15And now it's a different color.
00:29:17Oh, and it's on fire again.
00:29:19Why is everything on fire?
00:29:23It literally lights the Zune brand on fire.
00:29:26It's on fire.
00:29:27It's very good.
00:29:28It's very good.
00:29:28This is going to be a reference to squirting in the future.
00:29:31I know it's coming.
00:29:32You don't even know.
00:29:33We have to take a break.
00:29:34It's on fire.
00:29:35Yep.
00:29:36Yeah, we said squirting, and now we're taking a break.
00:29:43Morning, Zoe.
00:29:44Jeff Bridges.
00:29:45Why are you still living above our garage?
00:29:47I want to be in a T-Mobile commercial like you.
00:29:49Teach me, Sildana.
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00:29:52At T-Mobile, get the new iPhone 17 Pro.
00:29:54On them, it's designed to be the most powerful iPhone yet and has the ultimate pro camera system.
00:29:59Impressive.
00:30:00Let me try.
00:30:00At T-Mobile, you can save up to 20% versus the other big guys.
00:30:04You heard them.
00:30:05T-Mobile is the best place to get the new iPhone 17 Pro on us with eligible trade-in in any condition.
00:30:10Check them out.
00:30:11See how much you can save versus the other big guys at T-Mobile.com slash switch.
00:30:14All right, we're back.
00:30:15So, November 2006, the Zune launches.
00:30:20I'm going to read you the specs.
00:30:21It costs $249.99.
00:30:25Reasonable price for what it was at the time.
00:30:27It came in white, black, and brown.
00:30:29The brown.
00:30:30Brown, objectively the stupidest color, but also the one I love the most.
00:30:33Excuse you, it's the best color.
00:30:35It had a 30-gig hard drive.
00:30:37It had an FM tuner, which, love it.
00:30:39It had a three-inch screen.
00:30:41It had Wi-Fi, which was a big deal for reasons we should get into.
00:30:46One of the main features was that you could send tracks to other Zunes nearby.
00:30:51Sort of a, like, proto-airdrop kind of situation.
00:30:53But the best part was you could play, if I sent you a track fee, you could play it three
00:30:59times over three days.
00:31:01That's so stupid.
00:31:03And, Eli, what was the feature called?
00:31:04It was called squirting.
00:31:06Okay.
00:31:06You could squirt the tracks to each other.
00:31:09Literally in the marketing material.
00:31:11So, I'm squirting.
00:31:12Okay, this is what I was trying to figure out.
00:31:13Because everybody decided it was called squirting.
00:31:15But I could not, for the life of me, figure out if this was, like, the official name of the feature.
00:31:18Or if this is just, like, a funny joke that took off.
00:31:21But you're telling me, like, Microsoft believes it was called squirting.
00:31:24And the shape was the squircle.
00:31:27Oh, no.
00:31:28Okay, squircle.
00:31:28This is where it all came from.
00:31:31But, like, straight up, they're like, yeah, we've built the sharing system.
00:31:36Again, the music industry deeply involved, right?
00:31:39So, that's where you get this crazy DRM, where it's, like, your player is monitoring how
00:31:43often you're playing songs, and then disabling them.
00:31:46Okay, but how did it get through all of these marketing departments to be called squirting?
00:31:54Were, like, squirting.
00:31:55Uh-huh.
00:31:56And all they're doing, all they're doing, over and over and over again, is they're trying
00:31:59to differentiate the Zune from the iPod.
00:32:01By making it hipper, by making it edgier, by making it weirder.
00:32:04So, you get brown, you get squirting, you get birds on fire.
00:32:08Squirting, not good.
00:32:09Birds on fire, undecided.
00:32:10I think the idea of being able to, like, wirelessly share music with your friends is
00:32:17very cool.
00:32:18The way they did it, though.
00:32:19But, literally, like, as soon as you do the three plays over three days things, you've
00:32:23destroyed the future.
00:32:24I mean, like, at that time, we weren't really doing the whole streaming thing, right?
00:32:28That wasn't a thing.
00:32:29All of this is based on files.
00:32:30That's what I'm saying.
00:32:30They had all these right ideas, but to execute them, they had to literally move files around
00:32:34storage.
00:32:34This was the age where I actually gave a shit about curating my MP3 collection.
00:32:39This is why iTunes is a perfect piece of software.
00:32:41What on earth were you curating it?
00:32:42No, it was so bad.
00:32:43It was just, no, I was not doing it there.
00:32:45I had my own little folder, and, like, everything was named, its own little thing on my little
00:32:50hard drive.
00:32:50You weren't using ID3 tags?
00:32:52Listen.
00:32:52We gotta talk later.
00:32:53This explains so much about you.
00:32:55I was gonna ask when you first said iTunes is a perfect piece of software, if you were the
00:32:58guy who was going in and filling in all the metadata.
00:33:01Oh, no.
00:33:02Yeah.
00:33:03Anyway.
00:33:03Does this surprise you about Eli at all?
00:33:06No, not at all.
00:33:07Not at all.
00:33:08But, like, the whole thing about, like, the way you would share music is that, like, someone
00:33:11had the file, and so then you're getting the file, and you're building it.
00:33:15It's like collecting music Pokemon.
00:33:17Or at least that's how I viewed it when I was in high school.
00:33:19So the idea that you send it for three days on three plays, that's just also not how
00:33:24teenagers listen to music.
00:33:26You get that one song.
00:33:27Well, the goal was that they would get you to buy it, right?
00:33:29The idea was that you'd share it, and then you'd be like, I love this song.
00:33:32And then you would be like, I will now spend 99 cents.
00:33:35Which, again, in an internet world, good idea.
00:33:40It's just that the whole, it requires a bunch of pieces to work that didn't really work.
00:33:44I don't think that even turned out to be the right idea.
00:33:46Now what happens is you share a song, and you listen to it, and the artist gets point,
00:33:50half a cent.
00:33:51Sure.
00:33:51Right?
00:33:52Which is something.
00:33:53It's just a different, we've come to a different place.
00:33:55But the idea that you're going to share something, and you're going to get a little taste of it,
00:33:59and you're going to buy it, always a pipe dream.
00:34:02But also, it's just like, teens.
00:34:03Maybe.
00:34:03Teens are always going to be huge in making music culture just because they're insane.
00:34:07Yeah.
00:34:08But like, did we have money to do any of this stuff?
00:34:10No, I had no money, and I had no digital money.
00:34:13What am I going to do?
00:34:14Ask my mom, like, Mom, I need to buy this good anthem song off of iTunes.
00:34:18No, she's never going to approve that, even if it's 99 cents.
00:34:21Absolutely not.
00:34:22So, like, I just don't think that ever really worked.
00:34:25And, like, if you think about how teens listen to music, I think one play was, like, what,
00:34:30half the song file for Zoom?
00:34:32It was like a minute 30.
00:34:34I'm never listening to a minute 30 of a song.
00:34:36I'm sitting with my headphones, very emo, and in my teenage emotions, just listening
00:34:41to the same song 400 times in a row.
00:34:44Let's continue.
00:34:44We haven't even launched the Zoom.
00:34:46We haven't even launched the Zoom.
00:34:46So, to Microsoft's credit, there were two ways you could get music on the Zoom.
00:34:51One was, well, three.
00:34:52One was piracy.
00:34:53That was what everybody did.
00:34:54There was also the Zoom Marketplace, which was just iTunes, but with less stuff.
00:34:59That's a general consensus.
00:35:01Like, what if iTunes, but some of the songs weren't there, is the Zoom Marketplace.
00:35:05My favorite thing about the Zoom Marketplace was it was like a Dave & Buster system, where
00:35:08you paid real money to get Microsoft points, and then a song was 79 Microsoft points, which
00:35:14was the rough equivalent of a dollar.
00:35:15So, it's like, what are we doing?
00:35:18Where did they get 79 Microsoft points?
00:35:20My theory is they wanted it to sound cheap.
00:35:23They wanted the number to be lower, but they had to have the price the same.
00:35:26So, they just, it was, it cost the same, but they were hoping that, like, the psychology
00:35:30of it saying 79 instead of 99 would make you want to do it instead.
00:35:33But the other thing, there was a subscription music service.
00:35:37You could pay $14.99 a month for Zoom Pass, and you could subscribe to music.
00:35:41And at that time, no one wanted that.
00:35:43And it's actually very funny to read the coverage now, because over and over and over, people
00:35:47are basically like, why would you want to stream music?
00:35:50I want to own my music.
00:35:51I don't want to just pay to listen to music.
00:35:53My music library should be my music.
00:35:55And we have just done culturally such a 180 on that in two decades since.
00:35:59But, like, genuine kudos to Microsoft.
00:36:01It was way out in front of this idea that, like, maybe we can just charge you once and you
00:36:06can listen to all the music that you want.
00:36:07Wait, so I think I know why.
00:36:10As somebody who wrote a lot of blog posts about the Zoom back in the day, again, this
00:36:16thing had a Wi-Fi connection, but it wasn't a streaming device.
00:36:19It was just, it was, the only way to describe this is, like, we lived in the file system era.
00:36:24Like, you had to know about your file system.
00:36:26You had folders.
00:36:28Like, you were just doing it.
00:36:29And so, yes, there was a subscription service, but you were, like, picking what songs you
00:36:34wanted, syncing your Zoom, maybe wirelessly, but still having to sync, moving files over.
00:36:40Then you would, like, send them back.
00:36:41They would expire if, like, you were offline for too long.
00:36:44Like, everything about this subscription service was incompatible with, like, real life.
00:36:49And the reason people were like, I want to own my music is because it was so finicky that
00:36:55obviously owning your music was better.
00:36:56And then no one could take it away from all the stuff that people would say.
00:36:59And eventually when you get to Spotify, it's just streaming.
00:37:03So it's not that you have the music.
00:37:05It's, you can just go to the store and listen to whatever you want all the time, which Zoom
00:37:12music service could not offer you.
00:37:14Right.
00:37:14Because you were just on your Zoom with whatever files were on your Zoom.
00:37:16And it had a super limited set of music because, like, the number of people you can get to
00:37:21sign up for a subscription music service in 2006 is pretty small.
00:37:24So I think you're right.
00:37:24But it was like, but again, my overarching theory of the Zoom is increasingly, like, Microsoft
00:37:29was absolutely in the right place at absolutely the wrong time.
00:37:33It was too late for some things.
00:37:34It was too early for some things.
00:37:36And it, like, it missed by a mile, but like a mile in a series of inches.
00:37:41Do you know what I mean?
00:37:42Okay.
00:37:43So there was a bunch of other stuff that came with it.
00:37:44One of my favorite things about the Zoom was the Super 2006 list of accessories.
00:37:50You could buy a tape deck adapter for the Zoom that would plug into the headphone jack
00:37:53and then into the tape deck of your car.
00:37:55Oh, my God.
00:37:56Which, like, that, speaking of things that make me feel high school feelings, the tape
00:37:59deck adapter was the stuff.
00:38:01It had a car charger.
00:38:02It had a dock.
00:38:03Everybody liked the headphones, which were magnetic.
00:38:05And so the two backs would stick together in the earbuds.
00:38:08People were very excited about that.
00:38:10I mean.
00:38:11Lots of enthusiasm.
00:38:13It also came preloaded with a bunch of content, which I did not remember.
00:38:17There were nine preloaded albums, three preloaded film shorts, 12 music videos, and then just
00:38:23a bunch of rock posters and images.
00:38:25What were the nine albums?
00:38:25Santa Gold.
00:38:262006.
00:38:27Was on the list, I guess.
00:38:28Rattatat, I think, was there.
00:38:30The most 2006.
00:38:31So it was a lot of, like, indie pop stuff, especially.
00:38:36It was, like, they really made an, like, emphasis on having lesser known music.
00:38:43They, like, wanted to expose people to cool music via the Zoom, which I think is a cool
00:38:46idea.
00:38:47Microsoft Fairstine, by the way, has kind of, like, notably good taste in music.
00:38:50They made a lot of ads with, like, really good songs in them.
00:38:53Yeah.
00:38:53So this thing comes out in November.
00:38:55The review's mostly very bad.
00:38:58Yeah.
00:38:58Very bad.
00:38:58You were at Engadget, and Gadget had a review unit.
00:39:02Do you remember this at all?
00:39:03Oh, I mean, it's a huge deal.
00:39:04Like, you have to remember, like, this is the iPod killer.
00:39:06Yeah.
00:39:07And in those days, iPod killers get announced left and right.
00:39:10But this was Microsoft.
00:39:12They're doing it.
00:39:12They've integrated it.
00:39:13You got Jay Allard, who's a big personality, is running this team.
00:39:17So, like we've been talking about, the reviews were not great.
00:39:20And pretty much everybody had kind of the same theory that we've been talking about.
00:39:24Let me just play you a montage we made of some of the Zune reviews.
00:39:27The Zune, it is Microsoft's answer to the iPod.
00:39:30And the question is, can it take a bite out of Apple's dominance in the music industry?
00:39:35So we're iPod guys.
00:39:37I'm not.
00:39:37Have you seen anything in this that would make you switch over?
00:39:40No, not enough for me.
00:39:41I'm not sure if it's something I'd be interested in because of the size of the hard drive.
00:39:45But, I mean, all the features on it are pretty neat.
00:39:47It does a couple of things that are a little bit cooler than the iPod.
00:39:49But a lot of things that probably aren't.
00:39:51The cool thing is it has a radio in it, if that means anything to you.
00:39:54But the real cool thing is it has Wi-Fi.
00:39:56So that if you have a Zune and I have a Zune, we can trade music.
00:40:00And I actually have to go over and say, hey, Miles, can you beam me your song?
00:40:04Right.
00:40:05And then I can play it three times.
00:40:06And then if I want to buy it, I can buy it.
00:40:08So that's how it sort of works.
00:40:09But here's the part that's not so cool.
00:40:11If you have bought songs on iTunes, on Apple, for example, doesn't play here.
00:40:15You are limited to regular, unprotected MP3s.
00:40:18And rather than simply purchasing a single song like you would anywhere else, you must
00:40:23purchase blocks of credits that you can then use to download music.
00:40:27Why can't we just pay for a single song?
00:40:29We're also not big fans of the included earbuds that feel cheap and sound bad.
00:40:34On the upside, we do like the large, vibrant display.
00:40:37And the menu system is very simple to navigate.
00:40:40But that's about it.
00:40:41Why don't they get some decent design people to make things look better?
00:40:45It's clunky.
00:40:46It's clunky stuff.
00:40:46I, I, no comment.
00:40:48No comment.
00:40:49It's tough.
00:40:50Yeah.
00:40:51People were not psyched.
00:40:52And a bunch of that was from that Digital Trends review that was just ruthless about the
00:40:55whole thing.
00:40:56She was also just so...
00:40:58We didn't know how to do it back then.
00:41:00Yeah.
00:41:01No, but it...
00:41:02These were the first gadget reviews of all time.
00:41:04It just made it so much more brutal for her to be like, and it was bad.
00:41:08Your choices were writing like Walt Mossberg, which all of us tried to do, or faking the
00:41:14local news.
00:41:15And like, and then we all eventually developed some new moves, to our credit.
00:41:19I think it's a spread.
00:41:20But that, literally, everyone was like, this is the first time I've ever, anyone has ever
00:41:23reviewed a gadget.
00:41:24What should we do?
00:41:26I guess we're just gonna look, we're gonna do the fake Midwestern accent, we're gonna
00:41:30look dead on the camera, and we're gonna say, this is very bad.
00:41:32It is funny to remember that in retrospect, like, the anticipation of this thing was super
00:41:38high, and people were really optimistic that it might work.
00:41:40We know now, it didn't, and like, the Zune is a punchline now, but like, that whole year
00:41:46from like, this thing leaks to the FCC to the launch in November, the like, the stakes
00:41:51just keep getting higher, and people are like, this thing might work, it might be huge, this
00:41:54might be as big as the iPod.
00:41:56And it's hard to rewind your brain, or if you're younger, to like, even understand
00:42:02what gadget culture was like back then.
00:42:05There were no phones.
00:42:07Right.
00:42:08Like, phone ecosystems did not exist, like, and Gadget and Gizmodo were the first gadget
00:42:12blogs.
00:42:12Yeah.
00:42:13So, every, like, everyone was having these experiences for the first time, which is crazy
00:42:19to think about now.
00:42:20Like, there was not tech YouTube.
00:42:22So, like, this was, oh, the battle's being joined.
00:42:26By the big dog, right?
00:42:27Apple's the underdog, the empire's gonna strike back, here we go, and then this thing
00:42:32is just a sensational flop.
00:42:35It's so funny.
00:42:36Like, sensational flop.
00:42:37I came back from the land of feature phones and just going like, oh my god, Japan is in
00:42:43the future.
00:42:44Our phones suck.
00:42:45And I come back from, like, I think my first, like, winter break, and like, my friend
00:42:51has the Zune, and he's like, whipping it out of his pocket, and he's like, I got a Zune.
00:42:55So, first of all, shout out to CNET, which gave the Zune an eight.
00:43:00Wow.
00:43:01Classic.
00:43:01Just sort of leave that there.
00:43:02Classic move.
00:43:03But I think I can sort of explain the reviews in two and Gadget stories.
00:43:08Okay.
00:43:09And Neal, I'm curious if either of these jog any memories for you.
00:43:11On November 13th, 2006, Ryan Black posts a very long blog titled, Installing the Zune,
00:43:19dot, dot, dot, sucked.
00:43:20Yeah.
00:43:21This is before the review, and it's just a long, basically running diary of trying to
00:43:26set up the Zune software.
00:43:28And I think this is the story of the Zune, right?
00:43:30Like, for all the ideas it had, for all the things it got, right, every bit of getting
00:43:35this thing to work was a disaster.
00:43:38And everybody hated using it, which ultimately is what killed it.
00:43:41So, then two days later, he posts the review, and it is ruthless.
00:43:47Like, he just didn't like the Zune at all.
00:43:51I mean, let me just read you a bit from the very beginning.
00:43:54He says, we've got things we like and things we don't.
00:43:56Rough edges to go right along with the well-thought-out niceties.
00:43:58We came away underwhelmed and not at all surprised.
00:44:00And why?
00:44:01The expectations were for Microsoft to deliver a Microsoft player and system.
00:44:05Maybe not too shabby looking, but not very usable and definitely bug-ridden, which
00:44:08is a brutal burn of Microsoft, but also true.
00:44:10But everyone hoped Microsoft had got it right this time, eschewed patterns of old and gotten
00:44:14a fresh start with new blood, willing to think about things from outside the staid culture.
00:44:17But that just wasn't the case.
00:44:19It's a Microsoft product through and through.
00:44:21Yep.
00:44:22Brutal.
00:44:23Brutal!
00:44:23Brutal.
00:44:24But also pretty telling.
00:44:25I do love that Ryan still wrote in the Royal We.
00:44:28That was a real thing.
00:44:29Oh, yeah.
00:44:29We changed that later.
00:44:31So, let me just remind you of some things people did not like about the Zune.
00:44:34Some, you in particular, Neil, that we'll find very funny.
00:44:36It didn't support plays for sure.
00:44:38You just couldn't use Microsoft's DRM.
00:44:41Oh, their platform.
00:44:43Cool.
00:44:44Everybody had a lot of feelings about file formats.
00:44:47This is like a thing that I became very nostalgic for doing the research is like everybody had
00:44:51a bullet list of the file formats that you can put onto this thing.
00:44:54And then we're mad about the two that it didn't support.
00:44:56It was delightful.
00:44:57Did it not support AAC?
00:44:58It did not support AAC.
00:44:59That's right.
00:45:00So, the entire iTunes store was incompatible for soon.
00:45:02And people were very upset about it.
00:45:04It didn't support the Mac, which wasn't like a giant deal for a Microsoft product at the
00:45:09time, but people were still bummed.
00:45:10It didn't have podcasts.
00:45:12In terms of video, it only supported MWV.
00:45:16Only.
00:45:17That was the only one.
00:45:19Drove people nuts.
00:45:20So, this thing, again, it's like there's so many things about it that were almost there.
00:45:23And none of them were there.
00:45:27The other thing a lot of people said, to your point at the very beginning, everybody wished
00:45:31it had the click wheel.
00:45:32Like, everybody was like, we have figured out what works here, and it is the click wheel.
00:45:39Why is anybody doing anything else?
00:45:41Fascinating.
00:45:42And it's like, Apple patent number 607.
00:45:45Right.
00:45:46Let me just read you one more quote from a review.
00:45:48This is from Digital Trends, which gave it half a star.
00:45:50Wow.
00:45:51It says, the Microsoft Zoom is one of those products that you will want to avoid at
00:45:53all costs, at least this first generation.
00:45:56In comparison to other media players on the market, the Zoom offers no clear advantage.
00:45:59It has an audio and video library with less depth than iTunes, while the player itself
00:46:03has fewer features than offerings from Apple, Samsung, or Creative.
00:46:06Microsoft, like, tried to do so much and didn't actually do very much at all.
00:46:11It's like, kind of a wild outcome of this device.
00:46:15Truly fascinating.
00:46:16And also, if you bought something for the Zoom, you couldn't play it anywhere else.
00:46:20Very good.
00:46:20So, here's this, like, really interesting thing, like, this middle zone.
00:46:24Apple did exactly one thing well.
00:46:27Like, a really funny thing about the iPod is every iPod was essentially the exact same
00:46:33product.
00:46:34Except for the one iPod shuffle that had no screen and no buttons.
00:46:37That one was different, and that didn't work.
00:46:39But, like, the iPod, the iPod, and then the iPod Mini, and the iPod Nano, same interface,
00:46:45same menus, same wheel, played some music.
00:46:49By the end, they added Snake.
00:46:51And every year, and I've talked to Tony Fidel, who ran the iPod project at Apple for years,
00:46:56they just made it look different.
00:46:58And Microsoft was like, we'll do half of everything.
00:47:00Half of everything is, like, the Microsoft story in so, so many ways.
00:47:04They didn't listen to Ron Swanson when he said whole ass one thing.
00:47:08They don't have to ask multiple things.
00:47:10They didn't listen to Ron Swanson.
00:47:12So, despite all of that, this thing eventually became the most popular non-Apple media player.
00:47:20Which I guess is, like, isn't...
00:47:21It's just because it's Microsoft.
00:47:22Well, yeah, it's, like, saying it's the most popular non-Google search engine.
00:47:26Like, congratulations.
00:47:28You know what I mean?
00:47:28Yeah, there's that, but it's also, like, at the time, Apple, like,
00:47:30tried to pretend its competition was, like, SanDisk.
00:47:33You know, and be like, whatever, guys.
00:47:35Yeah.
00:47:37So, I'm just going to blow through the history.
00:47:39We will...
00:47:40The Zune HD was, like, peak Zune.
00:47:42But I just have a bunch of fun notes about what happened
00:47:46and how Microsoft tried to really make the Zune happen.
00:47:48Because it hit, like, 10% market share,
00:47:50and that was the highest it ever got, right?
00:47:52So, if you're Microsoft, you look at this,
00:47:53and you can either say, we're at 10% market share.
00:47:56Oh, no, this thing sucks.
00:47:57Or you say, we're at 10% market share.
00:47:59Let's, like, pour fuel on the fire.
00:48:00See if we can really make this work.
00:48:01That's what Microsoft decides to do.
00:48:03So, they did things like,
00:48:04they launched Zune 3.0, the big software update, in 2008.
00:48:09And they tried to juice sales by giving owners free Wi-Fi at McDonald's.
00:48:15This is their big promotion.
00:48:16If you got a Zune, you could use Wi-Fi at McDonald's.
00:48:18To squirt one song.
00:48:19To squirt your song.
00:48:20Oh, no.
00:48:21This is also the year, by the way,
00:48:22the Zune AD came out,
00:48:24and you have 500 Joy Division Zunes.
00:48:27Yep.
00:48:28Which worked.
00:48:30Steve Jobs quaking in his boots.
00:48:32This was right around the same time
00:48:33Microsoft appointed 200 different people as Zune masters.
00:48:37Oh, yeah.
00:48:37And it gave them all a bunch of, like, Zune swag.
00:48:39There's a lot of Zune swag out in the world.
00:48:41Like, a surprising number of people have Zune t-shirts still.
00:48:44There's that one guy famously got a Zune tattoo.
00:48:46We covered every ounce of his existence in Engadget.
00:48:50Oh, my God.
00:48:50We interviewed him.
00:48:51Years later, I think they went back to him and were like,
00:48:53are you good?
00:48:54Do you still have it?
00:48:54Yeah.
00:48:55That's great.
00:48:56Wait, he still has it?
00:48:57You didn't cover it up?
00:48:59It's 2025.
00:49:00I don't know what happened to this gentleman.
00:49:02If you're out there, get at us.
00:49:04We'd love to hear from you.
00:49:05But, like, Zune tattoo guy was a character on the pages of Engadget in Gizmodo.
00:49:09Oh, yeah.
00:49:09So, it's all, it's kind of happening.
00:49:11And then, another thing I had forgotten was,
00:49:14do you remember when all the Zunes failed?
00:49:15No.
00:49:16So, December 31st, 2008, all the Zunes failed.
00:49:21Because it was a leap year.
00:49:23Zunepocalypse.
00:49:23And the Zune's internal clock was not prepared for a leap year.
00:49:28It Y2K'd.
00:49:30And so, it eventually fixed itself 24 hours later.
00:49:35But they also, like, had a software thing you could do to update it.
00:49:39But it just, it did not understand the idea of a leap year.
00:49:43Oh, no.
00:49:43And so, they all just broke.
00:49:46And that's one of those things that I think you never really come back from reputationally.
00:49:51And Microsoft never did.
00:49:53So, 2009, the Zune HD comes out.
00:49:55Microsoft discontinues the old one.
00:49:57But already by then, this is 2009, it's over.
00:50:02Right?
00:50:02Everybody decides to get out of it.
00:50:04GameStop, which had been selling Zunes,
00:50:05decides to get out.
00:50:06But, yeah, what is, what has happened by 2009?
00:50:09Smartphones.
00:50:10It's all over there.
00:50:10Smartphones.
00:50:11So, right.
00:50:11So, at this point, the iPhone is out.
00:50:13Smartphones are, like, ascendant.
00:50:14And very famously, this is the time at which Microsoft makes very clear that it thinks
00:50:19all of this mobile stuff is nonsense.
00:50:21Let me play you.
00:50:22This is from 2007.
00:50:23This is a Steve Ballmer clip.
00:50:24This is a classic Ballmer.
00:50:26This is a Steve Ballmer clip talking about the iPhone.
00:50:28In the case of music and entertainment players, Apple absolutely has a preeminent position.
00:50:34We said we want to be in this market.
00:50:36There's a lot of reasons why there's synergy with other things that we're doing.
00:50:39We think we've got some unique innovations, particularly what we're doing with community,
00:50:43with wireless networking.
00:50:45And we came into the market, a market in which they're very strong.
00:50:49And we took, I don't know, I think most estimates would say we took about 20%, 25% of the high
00:50:53end of the market.
00:50:54We weren't down at some of the lower price points.
00:50:56But for devices, $249 and over, we took, you know, let's say about 20% of the market.
00:51:02So, I feel like we're in the game.
00:51:04We're driving our innovation hard.
00:51:07And we're not the incumbent.
00:51:09He's the incumbent in this game.
00:51:10But at the end of the day, he's going to have to keep up with an agenda that we're going
00:51:14to drive as well.
00:51:16What?
00:51:16Yeah.
00:51:17Do you think he ever thinks about that?
00:51:18And this is the same interview where later he was like, oh, we, $500 for a smartphone
00:51:22is crazy.
00:51:22He laughed at the iPhone.
00:51:23He laughed at the iPhone.
00:51:24This is all the same interview.
00:51:24So, this is Ballmer doubling down on the Zune after the iPhone came out.
00:51:29Like, that's where it all falls apart.
00:51:31You're going to have to keep up with the Zune with the iPod that you are rapidly cannibalizing
00:51:34with the iPhone.
00:51:35That you have absolutely immediately destroyed.
00:51:37So, this happens by 2011.
00:51:41Microsoft is just completely out of the business.
00:51:43It just decides to stop doing this.
00:51:45The iPod Touch is out.
00:51:47Fun fact, for a long time, people were out there being like, where's the Zune Touch?
00:51:50We want the Zune Touch.
00:51:52And that was...
00:51:53No.
00:51:55When you say people, would you say more than a dozen?
00:52:00There were some Zune heads.
00:52:01There were some Zune heads out there.
00:52:02I just want to put everyone back into this mindset.
00:52:06Like, yes, now phones are out.
00:52:07Android is on the rise.
00:52:09Like, you are starting to get the real fanboy wars in gadget culture.
00:52:14Right?
00:52:14Like, fandoms around these companies are starting to form in a way that...
00:52:18Maybe you get iOS versus Android now, to some extent.
00:52:21Even though that's calmed down.
00:52:22But like, back then, you had like, Team Microsoft.
00:52:25Like, we started The Verge and we had forums.
00:52:28We called it the Microsoft Tribe.
00:52:29Like, we were in it.
00:52:31And like, people wanting a Zune Touch was like, we want you in the game against Apple.
00:52:36And now it's just kind of like, well, the App Store is going to kill everything.
00:52:39Like, it's just a...
00:52:40It was such a different moment.
00:52:42It was.
00:52:42It was partially also because, like, I was still in Japan at this point in time.
00:52:46And the iPhone was not, like, coming over right away.
00:52:49And so the feature phone makers there were, like, not at all.
00:52:52They were kind of balmery about all of this happening.
00:52:56But they were all also integrating music, right?
00:52:57Like, I remember you could play music on all those feature phones.
00:53:00You could play music on all of them.
00:53:00You could pay for your Subway on all of them.
00:53:03That was like, the coolest thing.
00:53:05I was like, I can pay for things with my phone.
00:53:07Like, this was back in 2007, 2008.
00:53:10A lot of people in Japan didn't see any freaking reason to get a smartphone.
00:53:14So I remember I had an iPod Touch and a Japanese feature phone.
00:53:17And I had them at the same time.
00:53:19And for a long time, that's what a lot of people in Asia did.
00:53:22They would have the iPod Touch or an iPhone, and they would have their actual feature phone because these things had been, like, they called it the Galapagos effect because it had been so evolved to fit one society's actual particular needs.
00:53:35So, like, you saw these devices just kind of, like, eek along longer in Japan.
00:53:40But eventually, everyone just got a smartphone.
00:53:44Yeah, that's how it goes.
00:53:44And it just happened.
00:53:46And I think even in that transition, it was clear that that was where it was going to end, right?
00:53:49It was like, this might take a while to get there, but ultimately, it's pretty obvious that these two things are one.
00:53:54I held out for a really long time.
00:53:56I didn't get my first iPhone until 2012 because I was just double fisting an iPod Touch just for the apps and then my Japanese phone because I could do everything on these two things.
00:54:11And it was just like, I have no desire for an iPhone.
00:54:13And then once I got the iPhone, I did a little song.
00:54:16I called it my iPhone song.
00:54:17I was like, I got an iPhone.
00:54:18I got an iPhone.
00:54:19I'm walking down the streets of Ginza and going, like, iPhone.
00:54:22I got an iPhone.
00:54:23I'm so happy.
00:54:23And then I was like, bye.
00:54:26So, Microsoft spends this whole time ignoring the existence of smartphones.
00:54:31Great job, Microsoft.
00:54:32But also...
00:54:33No, they put the honeycomb launcher on Windows Mobile 6.5.
00:54:37That was the thing I had to contend with.
00:54:38That is a sentence that you just said.
00:54:40Sure did.
00:54:41They sure did that.
00:54:44But at the same time, they're also, like, getting out of the Zune business.
00:54:47And they all blamed each other, which I thought was very funny.
00:54:49So, all the product people blamed the marketing people for making insane ads about birds that didn't explain what the Zune was.
00:54:54Yeah.
00:54:54By the way, Zune Tattoo Guy was considering getting a tattoo of the flaming birds.
00:54:58I just want to give you an update from this right thread.
00:55:00All the product people blamed the marketing people.
00:55:02The music industry people blamed Microsoft for not executing well.
00:55:06Microsoft blamed the music industry for not promoting Zune enough.
00:55:09There's just this, like, years-long blame game all the way up until 2015 when it fully dies.
00:55:16And we're going to take a break.
00:55:17But first, I just want to play you the last hurrah of the Zune, which was Guardians of the Galaxy.
00:55:24Oh, what?
00:55:25It made a comeback, and it was something special from 2017.
00:55:30Pete!
00:55:30Pete!
00:55:34Captain found this for you in a junker shop.
00:55:36Said you'd come back to the bulb someday.
00:55:39Honestly, it's called a Zune.
00:55:43It's what everybody's listening to on Earth nowadays.
00:55:45It's got 300 songs on it.
00:55:47Three hundred songs?
00:55:49A hundred songs?
00:55:50Oh, my God.
00:55:51Yeah, when you become a punchline in Guardians of the Galaxy in 2017, it's a tough beat.
00:55:55Oh, my God.
00:55:56So that was the end of the Zune.
00:55:58It didn't miss by much, but it also missed by a lot.
00:56:00All right, we've got to take one more break, and then we're going to come back, and we're going to do the version history questions.
00:56:04Be right back.
00:56:04Morning, Zoe.
00:56:09Jeff Bridges, why are you still living above our garage?
00:56:11I want to be in a T-Mobile commercial like you.
00:56:14Teach me, Sildana.
00:56:15I couldn't possibly.
00:56:16At T-Mobile, get the new iPhone 17 Pro on them.
00:56:19It's designed to be the most powerful iPhone yet, and has the ultimate pro camera system.
00:56:23Impressive.
00:56:24Let me try.
00:56:24At T-Mobile, you can save up to 20% versus the other big guys.
00:56:28You heard them.
00:56:29T-Mobile is the best place to get the new iPhone 17 Pro on us, with eligible trade-in in any condition.
00:56:35Check them out to see how much you can save versus the other big guys at T-Mobile.com slash switch.
00:56:38All right, we're back.
00:56:39So on every episode of Version History, we have eight questions we ask.
00:56:43We're going to go through them all.
00:56:44Question number one, what was the best thing about the Zune?
00:56:47Neil, you go first.
00:56:48Okay.
00:56:49It was almost nothing.
00:56:51But it's not the Zune itself.
00:56:53Okay.
00:56:55The interface of the Zune, they didn't call it that back then.
00:56:58But it was the beginning of the Metro design language, which carried forth into Windows Phone, which carried forth into Windows itself.
00:57:05And now everything is kind of Metro.
00:57:07Like, everything looks like the Zune interface.
00:57:09And they got that idea right.
00:57:11They executed it totally wrong, and it was slow and impossible to use.
00:57:15But that was the best thing about the Zune.
00:57:17Yeah.
00:57:17I mean, that was going to be my answer, too, is the home screen.
00:57:19I think that the typography-based home screen that is actually designed.
00:57:25Because the Apple thing was purely, it just looked like a file system.
00:57:27It just was a file system.
00:57:29Like, Microsoft actually tried, and I appreciated that.
00:57:32Do you have a different answer?
00:57:33Um, slightly.
00:57:35Yeah.
00:57:35Because I also agree that that was actually the first thing that ever caught my eye about the Zune.
00:57:39But don't laugh at me.
00:57:41Brown was the right choice.
00:57:42No, it wasn't.
00:57:43Brown was the right choice.
00:57:44Because it was different.
00:57:45And, like, it gave it a different feel.
00:57:47But there's other colors.
00:57:48No, there are other colors.
00:57:49But, like, I think when I was thinking of the iPods of those days and seeing the bright colors of those iPods, it gave me a different feel.
00:57:56This gave me more of, like, a—I mean, when you feel it, it doesn't feel luxe.
00:58:00But when you look at it in someone's hand with the Metro design, it was just like, ooh, fancy.
00:58:05I will say, having—I had probably not touched a Zune in 15 years.
00:58:10And then I got this one and pulled it out.
00:58:11And my immediate instinct was like, oh, this is kind of nice.
00:58:14Like, it's, like, nice to hold.
00:58:15It kind of feels like an adult.
00:58:17In a way that even iPods were never really that nice to hold.
00:58:19They were very, like, sharp and angular.
00:58:22And, like, they were beautiful pieces of machinery.
00:58:25But they weren't, like, comfy in a way that it was kind of comfy.
00:58:30Look, you all can feel whatever you want about your brown Zune.
00:58:34All right, the market spoke.
00:58:35Listen, 2025 Pantone color, what is it?
00:58:38Mocha Moose.
00:58:39We're so back.
00:58:40We're so back.
00:58:41All right, question number two.
00:58:42What was the worst thing about this Zune?
00:58:44There's so many things.
00:58:45V, you got to pick one.
00:58:46I think the fact that you couldn't use it as a hard drive back then was, like, a really big one for me.
00:58:52As, like, a deciding factor why I was not going to jump off, like, Team iPod at that time.
00:58:57Because just—I just always had a bazillion different hard drives and flash drives on me.
00:59:02I—and, again, I cared about my music library curation.
00:59:06So the fact that I couldn't actually do that—
00:59:08But not enough.
00:59:08Not enough.
00:59:09Not to Neelai's degree of caring about my music library curation.
00:59:14But also, I thought they did the album art well.
00:59:16That was, like, my pet peeve.
00:59:18Just finding the correct album art for my music library curation, but also not up to Neelai's standards.
00:59:26It's just the tags.
00:59:26These aren't high standards.
00:59:28It was high—I don't like filling out the meta in WordPress.
00:59:32Why would I fill out the meta in—
00:59:34It all comes through.
00:59:3630 years later, we're still battling about metadata.
00:59:38So you think it's just—it's just the hard drive thing?
00:59:42That was one thing.
00:59:43But then also, I just never understood why I didn't use Windows Media Player.
00:59:48Like, they created a whole other software for it.
00:59:51Yeah, it's really true.
00:59:52All right, question number three.
00:59:54Oh, wait, you didn't say what the worst thing was.
00:59:55Oh, it was by far the software.
00:59:57Like, there's the Zune itself.
00:59:59And then you're like, you have to, like, use the software on your computer.
01:00:02And all of that was, like, a mess.
01:00:05Yeah, that was going to be my answer, too, is the trying to get music from my computer to the Zune.
01:00:10400 times more complicated than it felt like it needed to be.
01:00:13Yeah.
01:00:13Whereas, like, at some point, Apple, you just drag the thing, and it's probably fine.
01:00:17All right, question number three.
01:00:18Would it have been a bigger hit if Apple made it?
01:00:20Yes.
01:00:20The obvious answer is yes, because—
01:00:23They did.
01:00:23They did, and it's called the iPod.
01:00:24But I'm saying if Apple made the Zune with all the ideas of the Zune, could it have pulled it off?
01:00:30No.
01:00:31And because they looked at all the ideas for the Zune and just rejected them out of hand.
01:00:38Steve Jobs famously wrote Thoughts on DRM and basically just, like, roasted the music industry for even thinking that DRM was a good idea.
01:00:48They eventually caved on subscription services, but they knew the technology wasn't there at that time.
01:00:53Right.
01:00:53Yeah, you've got to assume there was a meeting at Apple, like, every six months about, like, should we do a music subscription?
01:00:58And everybody's like, well, no, it's impossible.
01:01:00Because of the file-based DRM that they had at the time.
01:01:04Until streaming happened, I don't think subscriptions were ever on the table for Apple.
01:01:07Yeah, all these ideas were, like, good, and they were too early, and they were, like, not—the technology was not there to support them.
01:01:15And Microsoft was looking for an edge, so it did all the stuff Apple wasn't doing.
01:01:19But Apple wasn't doing that stuff for a reason.
01:01:22Right.
01:01:22And this isn't just, like, Apple was always right.
01:01:24It was—there was one singular figure at Apple who—Apple doesn't have this kind of attitude anymore.
01:01:32But Steve Jobs would be like, I can't make this as good as I want it, so we're not going to make it.
01:01:36At all.
01:01:37Like, it's just not going to happen until it's good enough for me.
01:01:39Right.
01:01:40And that was also at the time Apple was so powerful in the music industry that it's not like it couldn't have done these things.
01:01:45Yeah.
01:01:45Like, you end up choosing not to do these things, and that's the only reason you don't do these things.
01:01:50Yeah.
01:01:51Do you agree?
01:01:52Yeah, yeah.
01:01:52We don't think Apple could do it.
01:01:53No.
01:01:53The Apple Zoom doesn't have a great ring to it.
01:01:55No, the Apple Zoom doesn't have a great ring to it, but, like, like Eli said at that time, I just think they would have been like, we could do it, but we won't.
01:02:02Okay, new question.
01:02:03Do you think a brown iPod would have sold?
01:02:06You know what?
01:02:09Yes.
01:02:10Because they would have chose the correct iPod.
01:02:12No.
01:02:12Do you think that brown iPod would have sold?
01:02:15That would not have sold.
01:02:17That did not fit.
01:02:18But see, like, that would have never happened because it just didn't fit into the design language of the colors that they chose.
01:02:23You have to remember, this is, I always talk about the local news test on the Vergecast.
01:02:28Like, they were just doing stuff to try to get coverage on the local news because that's what people were watching back then.
01:02:33There wasn't a YouTube, whatever.
01:02:34Like, you needed some, like, gimmicky morning zoo crew anchor to be like, and it comes in brown.
01:02:40Like, literally, they were doing things to attract that kind of attention, whether or not anyone ever bought the brown one.
01:02:46Whereas Apple would just be like, it's skinny now.
01:02:50And, like, that would work.
01:02:52You know, like, it was just a very different time to try to attract attention with these products.
01:02:56Totally.
01:02:57All right.
01:02:57Next question.
01:02:58If you could go back and make it yourself, what would you do differently?
01:03:01Obviously, the answer is lots of things.
01:03:03But I'm going to make you each pick one.
01:03:05Like, if you wanted to make the Zune work, give me one thing you would have changed.
01:03:10Neil, you go first.
01:03:11I would have made it do even fewer things.
01:03:13Interesting.
01:03:14Okay.
01:03:15Right.
01:03:15If your big bet is that you buy a Zune and you pay this fee monthly and you can make subscriptions work, you just got to finish that thought.
01:03:25Right.
01:03:26And then maybe you are competitive with Apple because you're saying, look, instead of buying all this music from iTunes, which we're not doing anyway, but it plays mp3, so that's fine.
01:03:34Instead of buying all this music from iTunes, we're just one fee and you get 20 songs a month and you just download them and you're good to go.
01:03:41Right.
01:03:41And, like, they didn't ever finish that thought.
01:03:45Instead, they were, like, off doing squirting.
01:03:48Like, whatever they're doing.
01:03:53Yeah.
01:03:53We're getting an explicit tag on this podcast.
01:03:55Oh, Jesus Christ.
01:03:58What about you?
01:03:58What would you change?
01:03:59The software.
01:04:00I would make it easy to use because, like, you know, just think about, like, what the whole thing about Apple is, right?
01:04:08It just works.
01:04:09It's easy to use.
01:04:10Like, your tech-addled grandma could figure it out.
01:04:14The fact that there were stories talking about how hard it was to install.
01:04:19I have ADHD.
01:04:21I do not have that patience to go and sit there and be like, I want this.
01:04:25Most people are just going to give up and go, like, oh, that's not worth it.
01:04:28So, if you could just make it easy to use, I think people would have, you know, forgiven it a little bit, the lesser library and the lesser catalog because you could use it.
01:04:40Instead, it's just like, ah, it's not easy to use and it's not a click wheel and it's not all these things.
01:04:45So, like, your answer is I would make it good?
01:04:49No, like, just to be more specific, I think I would just make the software good.
01:04:56Yeah.
01:04:57Yeah, make the software good.
01:04:59Big idea from V-SAN.
01:05:01Yeah.
01:05:01Just don't suck.
01:05:03That's my idea.
01:05:03This is a time in software where Apple was really focused on making beautiful software and everyone else was like, here's some stuff.
01:05:10Yep.
01:05:11And, like, Apple and its whole attitude, we live in the world that Apple created.
01:05:15Even Microsoft, you know, every Microsoft event is like, look at what our designers did.
01:05:20And, like, this was their first attempt at it.
01:05:22And I think they were like, it should be pretty.
01:05:25And then no one was like, does it work?
01:05:27I mean, like, you know, even if you just wanted to jerry-frig it, I'm bringing Windows Media Player back.
01:05:32You could have just done it through there.
01:05:34And that's something people, even if it's finicky, they're familiar with.
01:05:37They know it.
01:05:38It's not, like, a whole new thing that they have to learn for this thing that most of their friends don't already have, don't already know.
01:05:45So, you could at least just remove that barrier of, like, having to learn a new thing and enter an ecosystem where their friends aren't already there for.
01:05:54Yeah. My answer is I would have gone, I would have made a bunch of really dumb deals with the music industry to make the music industry like me more, right?
01:06:03Because I think if you can solve, if you can make squirting rough into, like, an actually good and useful feature, you have a really cool, like, virality thing that you can start to do with the Zune.
01:06:15If you can convince the music industry to let you give more music away or sell it cheaper or whatever, like, I would just try to be the best friend of the music industry, even if it cost me for a while.
01:06:26Because it's, like, that's how you become very powerful.
01:06:28I also would have gone in on podcasts, but that's 20 years of hindsight that no one had then, because podcasts were, like, two years old and no one was listening to them.
01:06:37But that was, like, if you want to be the audio player, which I think it wanted to be, it could have been early to that in a way that actually might have worked.
01:06:47So, that's what I would have done. It wouldn't have worked.
01:06:49Yeah. It's real hard to be, like, let's look back at the Zune and see what would have worked.
01:06:54The next question is, what feature of this thing should every current version have?
01:06:58What would you pull off of the Zune and put onto media players or even your phone in 2025?
01:07:04FM radio.
01:07:05That's mine, too.
01:07:06We're locked in today.
01:07:08Wow. That was the feature I cared the least about.
01:07:11I have come all the way back around on radio.
01:07:14Like, I listen to radio in the car sometimes now, where it's just like, you know what's nice is when I just get in and something is on.
01:07:20And I'm going to listen to that for 10 minutes.
01:07:21This is such a theme with David.
01:07:22All right. So, for us, it's FM radio. It's not for you, V. What do you think?
01:07:25Oh, I actually think that the thing that should be on everything is on everything now, because I think the Zune pass was the smartest idea they had, kind of.
01:07:32And it actually is on everything now.
01:07:35Next question is the one I have thought about the most with the Zune.
01:07:39And it's, is there an alternate timeline in which this thing was more or even more successful?
01:07:43Can you, like, Thanos snap Apple away?
01:07:46No, but you can ship it earlier or ship it later.
01:07:49But you can't just take Apple off the board?
01:07:51No.
01:07:52Then no.
01:07:52Maybe. I think it's timing.
01:07:55Like, if they had figured it out, I just think Microsoft's inherent curse is timing.
01:07:59They always have some good ideas, but never at the time where they should have the ideas.
01:08:04So, like, I think maybe there's a timeline where it comes out.
01:08:09And maybe it's early enough that the iPod is not caught on yet.
01:08:13And some people just, for whatever reason, people really love this thing still in 2025.
01:08:18So, maybe. Maybe. But it's a big maybe.
01:08:21That was the only thing I could think of is, like, if it had been four years earlier.
01:08:25And, you know, Gates sends that email the day after the first iPod and not the fourth iPod.
01:08:30I think he sent a lot of emails about Steve Jobs that had that tone.
01:08:33He's like, he's done it again.
01:08:35This is strange.
01:08:37What are you guys doing?
01:08:38Like, can't we make nice things?
01:08:39There's a lot of those emails from Bill Gates over the years.
01:08:41I don't think so.
01:08:42I think Microsoft, as a company, during that time, was organized around essentially business development.
01:08:50Right? Like, the thing Microsoft did was make deals.
01:08:53Yeah.
01:08:53And the thing Apple did was make products.
01:08:55And so, I'm saying, you've got to take Apple off the board because every other company was also, like, a deal-making company.
01:09:01And so, you get this weird halfway DRM label licensing, blah, blah, blah, because that's what the lawyers and the MBAs wanted.
01:09:12Question number seven.
01:09:13Could you reboot it now?
01:09:15Oh, they definitely could.
01:09:16You're so far away from the reality of the thing that if Microsoft came out and, like, the Zoom's back, like, and did a bunch of Guardians clips, like, no one would remember the product.
01:09:24But, like, why would you?
01:09:26I mean, I guess you could in the sense that there's, like, a nostalgia for that time period right now.
01:09:31Like, the Canon G7X is a thing.
01:09:34I thought we, like, got rid of point-and-shoots and then the children are just like, no, it was better back then.
01:09:39So, maybe you could have people rebooting it from a sense of nostalgia.
01:09:43But do I think they could reboot it and it would have the degree of success that the Razer Motorola foldable phones have right now?
01:09:49No.
01:09:50Right.
01:09:51Yeah, I mean, I think, like, could you make and sell a, like, limited edition 20th anniversary Zune and—
01:09:58A 20th anniversary Joy Division with 300 versions?
01:10:01You see what I'm saying?
01:10:02Yeah.
01:10:02Make 5,000 of them.
01:10:04Could you sell 5,000 of them?
01:10:05I think yes, for sure.
01:10:06Right.
01:10:06Is there a world in which the Zune becomes, like, a hit product?
01:10:10I don't think so.
01:10:11I think a lot of people really like the idea of having a dedicated music player again.
01:10:16And I don't think that many people actually want a dedicated music player again.
01:10:20Yeah, because even your phone, if you get rid of all your apps, is going to play music.
01:10:25Right.
01:10:25Like, I think about the car thing that Spotify put out, that it's, like, it's a dedicated gadget for playing music in the way that people play music in 2025.
01:10:32And you're like, oh, intellectually, that's kind of a cool idea.
01:10:35And then you get into the car and you're like, oh, that is just my phone.
01:10:38I did that already.
01:10:40I tend to agree.
01:10:41All right.
01:10:41So, last question.
01:10:42Does the original Zune belong in the Version History Hall of Fame?
01:10:46Yes.
01:10:47Yes.
01:10:47Wow.
01:10:48Yes.
01:10:48Okay.
01:10:49Hard yes.
01:10:50And I will say, the rubric, essentially, is just, did this thing matter in some important way in the history?
01:10:56It doesn't have to have been great or awful or vastly successful.
01:11:00It just has to have mattered.
01:11:01This is like a case study.
01:11:02I think we've proved in the last however long we've been talking about Microsoft.
01:11:06This is like, if you want to know about Microsoft at this point in time, all you have to do is study the Zune.
01:11:10And, like, you will understand everything about Microsoft from that point in time.
01:11:15So, yeah, it does.
01:11:16I mean, it's in the Guardians of the Galaxy movie.
01:11:18It's true.
01:11:19It's been immortalized.
01:11:19It was also in the Big Bang Theory.
01:11:20The Simpsons did it.
01:11:22There's a lot.
01:11:24You could play Doom on it.
01:11:25We found that out.
01:11:26It kind of hits all the beats.
01:11:28You agree?
01:11:28I agree.
01:11:29I agree with what V said.
01:11:30Like, this is just a perfect picture of Microsoft.
01:11:32It's also the tech industry and the entertainment and culture industries collided, and their inability to see each other resulted in the Zune.
01:11:43Like, you can just see that, like, they don't like each other.
01:11:46Yeah.
01:11:47And the products they want to make and the products they allow each other to make are brown Zune.
01:11:52Here you go.
01:11:53So, we're putting—
01:11:54Specifically the brown Zune is going.
01:11:55I was going to say, we're putting the brown one in the Hall of Fame, specifically.
01:11:57Oh, absolutely the brown one.
01:11:58Okay.
01:11:58And I would even bring that forward to now, right?
01:12:01The character of Steve Jobs in the history of computing did a lot of things, accomplished a lot of things.
01:12:08Because the number one thing that Steve Jobs had, that even our current CEOs do not have, is he understood the artists.
01:12:16He cared about them.
01:12:17He gave a shit.
01:12:18How many times have you seen a clip of Steve Jobs being like, I really cared about proportional fonts, and then Microsoft copied them for me, right?
01:12:25And all of that, like, we are making tools so that you will make culture, and then the iPod is there because I love Bob Dylan.
01:12:33And he was able to go to the artists themselves and connect with them and build great products because he respected them.
01:12:41And that—Microsoft just couldn't do it for the longest time.
01:12:44They got a little bit better at it, but still, they're not as good as Apple.
01:12:47And then now you've got the new crop of CEOs who are like, here's what we did.
01:12:50We trained all of our AI and your shit for free, and now we just make it, and you get nothing.
01:12:54And it's like, oh, we've lost something along the way.
01:12:57And the Zune is a case study of, like, the first glimmer of making it pretty isn't enough.
01:13:02You've got to go get the work.
01:13:05And I think Microsoft, they face-planted so hard, they kind of had to learn that lesson.
01:13:10I like it. I agree.
01:13:11I thought I was going to have to fight both of you to get in the Hall of Fame, but we're unanimous.
01:13:15This is very exciting.
01:13:15So into the rafters.
01:13:17I don't know.
01:13:18The Hall of Fame is going to need a physical instantiation at some point, but we'll figure that out.
01:13:23It's not just this room.
01:13:23It might just be this room.
01:13:25All right.
01:13:26That is it for the show.
01:13:27We are done here.
01:13:28V and Eli, thank you so much for doing this.
01:13:29This was a delight.
01:13:30Put the Joy Division Zune away before something bad happens to it.
01:13:33This is very important.
01:13:34Thank you, as always, for being here with us.
01:13:36This thing is going to send my kid to college one day.
01:13:37Oh, my God.
01:13:39You know, I think you could get $5,000 for that.
01:13:41That's how much college it's going to cost in 15 years.
01:13:44It's going to be great.
01:13:46All right.
01:13:47Thank you, as always, for being here with us.
01:13:48As ever, you can watch all of our episodes on YouTube.
01:13:50You can listen to them wherever you get podcasts.
01:13:52And if you want to support all this, including the purchasing of more Joy Division Zunes,
01:13:56the best way to do so is to subscribe to TheVerge.com.
01:13:59We'll see you next time.
01:14:01Thanks for being here.
01:14:01Will you ever turn it on?
01:14:03I would have to take the sticker off.
01:14:05Oh, okay.
01:14:06So that's a no.
01:14:06Morning, Zoe.
01:14:21Jeff Bridges, why are you still living above our garage?
01:14:24I want to be in a T-Mobile commercial like you.
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