Zune Day

Tuesday, November 14, 2006 marks the general commercial availability of the new Microsoft Zune digital media player, Microsoft's answer to the iPod.

I am truly amazed at the degree of negativity directed at Zune and its creators, even from respectable and otherwise compettent media professionals. Sure, the first Zune model out of the gate has a number of issues, but all products have issues of some sort or another.

There is no need to catalog all or even some of the criticisms here, but from what I can gather from reading the specs and descriptions and photos and videos online, Zune is a fairly decent product, and I am sure it will grow ever more capable as the months and quarters and years tick by.

Maybe, in some sense, we should all be grateful that so many people are trying so hard to hold Microsoft to such a high standard. I'm sure it will help to keep the prodct quality quite high.

Read about Zune yourself and make up your own mind.

Stay abreast of the evolving Zune "community" with the Zune Insider blog moderated by Cesar Menendez of the Zune team.

I do have to disclose that I am an employee of The Evil Empire (Microsoft). I am not part of the immediate Zune team, but I do work in the Entertainment and Devices Divsion which includes, among many other products, both Zune and the Windows CE operating system and application software used for devices such as Windows Mobile smartphones and the various flavors of Pocket PC and embedded devices.

-- Jack Krupansky