Correct. If you had bought Windows Phone, it still works today. It's unbelievable that they have kept the whole thing running for may be 10,000 people out there.
But generally speaking I don't disagree with your assessment. It's just that media for hire was never really their strong suit and the Zune was a bit of a joke.
Where they must have suffered a world of pain is to keep old software compatible on newer Windows versions and I actually appreciate that.
Spoken like someone who never owned one. The hardware (built by Toshiba) was excellent as was the software - if you avoided the harebrained DRM scheme and loaded your own MP3s.
You may recall that this completely idiotic DRM implementation allowed to beam a DRMd song up to 3 times to other Zune users. That process was called squirting.
One /. commenter suggested that one should imagine Steve Balmer in the process of squirting.
EEE was a strategy for destroying standards through proprietary extensions:
> Extinguish: When extensions become a de facto standard because of their dominant market share, they marginalize competitors that do not or cannot support the new extensions.
They didn't shut down services, they'd make previous market leaders irrelevant & alternate implementations difficult to impossible (as they couldn't keep up).
Their attitude here would have been to not buy Nest but ship devices reimplementing the Works-With-Nest protocol, then add convenient / useful new features to the protocol in ways difficult for Nest to implement, and finally manage to lock it down such that Nest simply wouldn't be able to use the extensions while retaining compatibility with WwN devices themselves.
