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.
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.