Version History: Zune

22:44So this is after it comes out. He's talking to all the money people, and he says, Microsoft will be involved in the hardware, the software, and the services. We think that's important to produce the number one thing that has to happen in this marketplace, which is a great customer experience. And we have to tie those things together in some ways like we have in the Xbox world, where the hardware software and Xbox Live service, we have tied things together. So again, all of this is tying stuff together. And then he goes, and that's why Zune is important, and it is a way we're going to differentiate ourselves because 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.

23:17Like the ambition is like as big as the world here. We're going to build everything and it's all going to be called Zune. But this is like, the vision here is huge. And 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 between 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. Like, that's the stuff Microsoft was trying to do. And it was going to be Zune. That was the thing. Bill Gates came to CS every year.

23:50This is when CS was like a really big deal. And he would give the keynote and he would basically be like, we're going to put a PC in your living room. And so they applied that same strategy to personal media, portable media center. Well, they tried to make it social, which I think is really fascinating. And 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. But they, like, really understood the network effects of making this stuff sort of cross-human in a way that, like, the iPod just wasn't – like, none of these MP3 players were, like, social devices.

24:22Like, you had yours and you'd hand it to other people. But, like, you having an iPad didn't make my iPod more interesting. No, this was the age of mixtapes and CD burning. Right, exactly. And your friend writing little messages and Sharpie on the little thing. And I just opened like a CD case from that time period not that long ago. And it was like my best friend from high school, who's still my best friend today, just going like, 4V. Yeah. Love, A. And I was like, oh, my God. Do you remember the smell of burning a CD? Yes. Oh, yeah. It's very visceral. It's gone. It's like you will never smell that again.

24:55No. Yeah. But yeah, that was the time, right? Apple understood that music was intensely personal. And Microsoft thought of music as a way to get a PC in your living room. And just radically different approaches to this whole ecosystem. But if you boil all of that down, it is the right idea, right? And I think Microsoft's whole problem has been it can't figure out how to make products for regular humans. That remains its problem today. But I think it was just fascinating to me to see all of this. And it's like, OK, this is 2006. And Microsoft is like the big 30 ,000 foot idea was the right one.

25:30Like, what if we make all this stuff social? What if we connect at all? What if we become as much a sort of consumer services business as anything else? It kind of worked. Just not for Microsoft. But the other thing that I found is that there was a real interest in the Zune early on from labels because they wanted leverage over Apple, which at that point was so powerful and so big that all these labels, which had like really appreciated what Apple brought, which was the like better than privacy or better than piracy experience, was too powerful. And there was a sense that like we need to have some leverage back.

26:08Right. They wanted more of a cut. They wanted variable pricing in the iTunes store. So they wanted songs. I think eventually they got it, where some songs to be$0.79 and some songs to be$1.29, right? So they wanted the ability to do pricing like they could do in stores. And then what they really wanted, which Apple never gave them, what they really wanted was a cut of every iPod sold. And Sony desperately wanted this. Like desperately, desperately wanted a little bit of every iPod sold. Like a little, just a little cut off the top. And they thought that if they could build up the Zune or whoever else, they would have the leverage to go get this.

26:42You know who got that deal? Microsoft. Of course. Microsoft offered that deal. Yeah. So it was UMG in particular, Universal Media Group, that picked that fight and won it. And so one of Microsoft's deal was to give hardware revenues with labels and artists. Fascinating. Didn't work. I have a really great quote from, this is Doug Morris, who was the CEO and chairman of UMG at the time. He said, these devices are just repositories for stolen music and they all know it. So it's time to get paid for it. That's really what this is about. Like that is just that's the music industry side of this whole story.

27:12So like we want somebody other than Apple to be big so that we can make everybody pay us more money. Kind of worked. And then Microsoft made that deal with UMG and then said it would make the same deal with other labels, too. But UMG at that point was like leading the charge. Yeah. So one other moment in the run up to this that I thought was really interesting is on August 1st of 2006, the New York Post runs a story that like panics everybody in all of this. Because, again, we're in this moment where, like, lots of information is out. Product hasn't launched. Still don't know a lot of details.

27:43And the story essentially said that Microsoft was, A, planning to delay the video stuff that it was going to do on its iPod killer, which made people nervous because video was supposed to be one of the, like, big reasons to get something that is in an iPod. And 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. And people did not like this. They hated it. Like the entertainment industry is like absolutely not like Microsoft is trying to get away from the especially in video the like get pay for episodes of TV shows or pay for a movie or whatever.

28:20And they wanted to just essentially do a streaming thing, right? We're like we're going to be a free streaming service and we're going to support it with ads. And all the same people who really wanted competition for the iPod did not want competition among ad buyers. And 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. It turned out it was fine. Because it didn't work. It didn't work. It is a fun counter theory of like, what if Microsoft did like, what if the Zune had like really hit?

28:48A lot of what you're describing here is Microsoft being so early to good ideas that they couldn't execute them. The Zune had Wi-Fi, but it wasn't streaming, right? It was just for sync on your own local network and it killed the battery. So 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. It's just, like, none of this is correct. And then, you know, fast forward later, and Spotify is, like, dynamic ad insertion and podcast. Like, they can do all this stuff because it's streaming it instead of transferring it to big computers.

29:20Right, yeah, this whole set of stuff that works over the internet doesn't work. Like, the cloud does not exist. Microsoft has never gotten a sense of timing, like, to save its life. It's always too late or too early to something. It's never just on time, which is sad. We should take a break here, and then we're going to get to the launch and what happened after. But first, I just want to commend Microsoft because it launched a website saying our product is coming soon, and it was comingzune.com. Oh, yeah. I know. I remember. And I think that's very good. And I also would just like to play you the very first Zune ad, which started as a video at the bottom of that website.

29:59and if either of you can explain to me what this ad is and why it exists, I'd really love that. Challenge accepted. Oh boy. Oh, I accepted too soon. This is that really twee 2006 era. Oh my God. You know? Is that like a bee? Oh, it's a bird. It's two little birds. It's a bird. Yeah, and one of them just catches fire. It's on fire and headbanging. Oh no. Wow. Oh, no. And now it's a different color. No, it's on fire again. Why is everything on fire? It literally lights the Zune brand on fire. It's on fire. It's very good. It's very good. This is going to be a reference to squirting in the future.

30:46I know it's coming. You don't even know. We have to take a break. It's on fire. Yep. Yeah, we said squirting, and now we're taking a break. We'll be right back.

30:58Morning, Zoe. Jeff Bridges, why are you still living above our garage? I want to be in a T-Mobile commercial like you. Teach me, Sildana. I couldn't possibly. At T-Mobile, get the new iPhone 17 Pro on them. It's designed to be the most powerful iPhone yet and has the ultimate pro camera system. Impressive. Let me try. At T-Mobile, you can save up to 20 % versus the other big guys. You heard them. T-Mobile is the best place to get the new iPhone 17 Pro on us with eligible trade-in in any condition. Check them out to see how much you can save versus the other big guys at cmobile.com slash switch.

31:29All right, we're back. So, November 2006, the Zune launches. I'm going to read you the specs. It cost$249.99. Reasonable price for what it was at the time. It came in white, black, and brown. The brown. Brown, objectively the stupidest color, but also the one I love the most. Excuse you, it's the best color. It had a 30-gig hard drive. It had an FM tuner, which, love it. It had a three-inch screen. It had Wi-Fi, which was a big deal for reasons we should get into. One of the main features was that you could send tracks to other Zunes nearby. Sort of a like proto-airdrop kind of situation. But the best part was you could play, if I sent you a track fee, you could play it three times over three days.

32:16That's so stupid. And, Eli, what was the feature called? It was called squirting. Okay. You could squirt the tracks to each other. Literally in the marketing material. So I'm squirting. Okay. This is what I was trying to figure out because everybody decided it was called squirting. But I could not for the life of me figure out if this was like the official name of the feature or if this is just like a funny joke that took off. But you're telling me like Microsoft believes it was called squirting. And the shape was the squircle. Oh, no. Okay. Squircle. This is where it all came from. But like straight up, they're like, yeah, we've built the sharing system.

32:51Again, the music industry deeply involved. Right? So that's where you get this crazy DRM where it's like your player is monitoring how often you're playing songs and then disabling them. And it's hard parts. How did it get through all of these marketing departments to become squirting? We're like squirting. And all they're doing, all they're doing over and over and over again is they're trying to differentiate the Zune from the iPod by making it hipper, by making it edgier, by making it weirder. So you get brown. You get squirting. Okay, brown good. Birds on fire. Squirting, not good. Birds on fire, undecided.

33:27I think the idea of being able to, like, wirelessly share music with your friends is very cool. The way they did it, though. But literally, like, as soon as you do the three plays over three days things, you've destroyed the future. I mean, like, at that time, we weren't really doing the whole streaming thing, right? That wasn't a thing. All of this was based on files. That's what I'm saying. They had all these right ideas, but to execute them, they had to literally move files around. This was the age where I actually gave a shit about curating my MP3 collection. This is why iTunes was a perfect piece of software.

33:56What on earth were you curating it? No, it was so bad. It was just, no, I was not doing it there. I had my own little folder and, like, everything was named its own little thing on my little hard drive. You weren't using ID3 tags? Listen. We got to talk later. This explains so much about you. I was going to ask when you first said iTunes is a perfect piece of software if you were the guy who was going in and filling in all the metadata. Oh, no. Anyway. way. Does this surprise you about Eli at all? No, not at all. Not at all. But like the whole thing about like the way you would share music is that like someone had the file and so then you're getting the file and you're building it.

34:30It's like collecting music Pokemon. Or at least that's how I viewed it when I was in high school. So the idea that you send it for three days on three plays, that's just also not how teenagers listen to music. No. You get that one song. The goal was that they would get you to buy it, right? The idea was that you'd share it and then you'd be like I love this song and then you would be like I will now spend 99 cents which again in an internet world good idea it's just that the whole it requires a bunch of pieces to work that didn't really work I don't think that even turned out to be the right idea now what happens is you share a song and you listen to it and the artist gets point half a cent sure which is something it's just a different we've come to a different place but the idea that you're going to share something and you're going to get a little taste of it and then you're going to buy it But also it's just like teens.

35:18Maybe. Teens are like always going to be huge in making music culture just because they're insane. Yeah. But like did we have money to do any of this stuff? No. I had no money and I had no digital money. What am I going to do? Ask my mom like mom I need to buy this good anthem song off of iTunes. No. She's never going to approve that even if it's 99 cents. Absolutely not. So like I just don't think that ever really worked. And like if you think about how teens listen to music. I think one play was like what? half the song file for Zoom. It was like a minute 30. I'm never listening to a minute 30 of a song.

35:52I'm sitting with my headphones, very emo and in my teenage emotions, just listening to the same song 400 times in a row. Let's continue. We haven't even launched the Zoom. We haven't even launched the Zoom. So to Microsoft's credit, there were two ways you could get music on the Zoom. One was, well, three. One was piracy. That was what everybody did. There was also the Zoom Marketplace, which was just iTunes, but with less stuff. that's a general consensus of like what if iTunes but some of the songs weren't there is the Zune Marketplace. My favorite thing about the Zune Marketplace was it was like a like a Dave & Buster's system where you paid real money to get Microsoft points and then a song was 79 Microsoft points which was the rough equivalent of a dollar.

36:31So it's like what are we? 79. How did they get 79 Microsoft points? My theory is they wanted it to sound cheap they wanted the number to be lower but they had to have the price the same so they just it was it cost the same But they were hoping that like the psychology of it saying 79 instead of 99 would make you want to do it instead. But the other thing, there was a subscription music service. You could pay$14.99 a month for Zune Pass and you could subscribe to music. And at that time, no one wanted that. And it's actually very funny to read the coverage now because over and over and over people are basically like, why would you want to stream music?

37:05I want to own my music. I don't want to just pay to listen to music. My music library should be my music. And we have just done culturally such a 180 on that in two decades since. But like genuine kudos to Microsoft. It was way out in front of this idea that like maybe we can just charge you once and you can listen to all the music that you want. Wait, so I think I know why. As somebody who wrote a lot of blog posts about the Zune back in the day, again, this thing had a Wi-Fi connection, but it wasn't a streaming device. It was just – it was – the only way to describe this is like we lived in the file system era.

37:40Like you had to know about your file system. You had folders. Like you were just doing it. And so, yes, there was a subscription service, but you were like picking what songs you wanted, syncing your Zune, maybe wirelessly, but still having to sync, moving files over. Then you would like send them back. They would expire if you were offline for too long. Like everything about this subscription service was incompatible with like real life. And the reason people are like, I want to own my music is because it was so finicky that obviously owning your music was better. No one could take it away from all the stuff that people would say.

38:14And eventually when you get to Spotify, it's just streaming. So it's not that you have the music. It's you can just go to the store and listen to whatever you want all the time, which Zoom music service could not offer you. Right. Because you were just on your Zoom with whatever files were on your Zoom. Right, and it had a super limited set of music because, like, the number of people you can get to sign up for a subscription music service in 2006 is pretty small. So I think you're right. But it was like – but again, my overarching theory of the Zune is increasingly, like, Microsoft was absolutely in the right place at absolutely the wrong time.

38:48It was too late for some things. It was too early for some things. And it, like, it missed by a mile, but, like, a mile in a series of inches. Do you know what I mean? Okay, so there was a bunch of other stuff that came with it. Like, one of my favorite things about the Zune was the Super 2006 list of accessories. You could buy a tape deck adapter for the Zune that would plug into the headphone jack and then into the tape deck of your car. Oh, my God. That, speaking of things that make me feel high school feelings, the tape deck adapter was the stuff. It had a car charger. It had a dock. Everybody liked the headphones, which were magnetic, and so the two backs would stick together in the earbuds.

39:23People were very excited about that. Lots of enthusiasm. It also came preloaded with a bunch of content, which I did not remember. There were nine preloaded albums, three preloaded film shorts, 12 music videos, and then just a bunch of rock posters and images. Santa Gold was on the list, I guess. Rattatat, I think, was there. The most 2006. So it was a lot of like indie pop stuff especially. It was like they really made an like emphasis on having lesser known music. They like wanted to expose people to cool music via the Zune, which I think is a cool idea. Microsoft Fairstown, by the way, has kind of like notably good taste in music.

40:06They made a lot of ads with like really good songs in them. Yeah. So this thing comes out in November. The review's mostly very bad. Yeah. Very bad. We're adding Gadget, and Gadget had a review unit. Do you remember this at all? Oh, it was a huge deal. Like, you have to remember, like, this is the iPod killer. Yeah. And in those days, iPod killers get announced left and right. But this was Microsoft. They're doing it. They've integrated it. You got Jay Allard, who's a big personality, is running this team. So, like we've been talking about, the reviews were not great. And pretty much everybody had kind of the same theory that we've been talking about.

40:39Let me just play you a montage we made of some of the Zune reviews. called a Zune. It is Microsoft's answer to the iPod. And the question is, can it take a bite out of Apple's dominance in the music industry? Starting today, Microsoft is trying to take a bite out of Apple's enormous success. So we're iPod guys. Have you seen anything in this that would make you switch over? Not enough for me. Not sure if it's something I'd be interested in because of the size of the hard drive, but I mean, all the features on it are pretty neat. It does a couple of things that are a little bit cooler than the iPod, but a lot of things that probably aren't.

41:11The cool things has a radio in it, if that means anything to you. But the real cool thing is it has Wi-Fi, so that if you have a Zune and I have a Zune, we can trade music. And I actually have to go over and say, hey Miles, can you beam me your song? And then I can play it three times, and then if I want to buy it, I can buy it. So that's how it sort of works. But here's the part that's not so cool. If you have bought songs on iTunes, on Apple for example, it doesn't play here. You are limited to regular, unprotected MP3s and these are downloaded directly from the Zoom marketplace. Zoom's new online music store only offers about 2 million songs.

41:45iTunes has 3.5 million. Rather than simply purchasing a single song like you would anywhere else, you must purchase blocks of credits that you can then use to download music. Why can't we just pay for a single song? We're also not big fans of the included earbuds that feel cheap and sound bad. On the website, we do like the large, vibrant display, and the menu system is very simple to navigate. But that's about it. Why don't they get some decent design people to make things look better? It's clunky. It's clunky. It's no comment. It's tough. Yeah, people were not psyched. And a bunch of that was from that Digital Trends review that was just ruthless about the whole thing.

42:25It was also just so... We didn't know how to do it back then. Yeah. No, but it— These were the first gadget reviews of all time. It just made it so much more brutal for her to be like, and it was bad. I really appreciate art. Your choices were writing like Walt Mossberg, which all of us tried to do, or faking the local news. And then we all eventually developed some new moves to our credit. Like it's a spread. But literally everyone was like, this is the first time anyone has ever reviewed a gadget. What should we do? I guess we're just going to look—we're going to do the fake Midwestern accent.

42:59We're going to look dead on the camera. I want to say, this is very bad. It is funny to remember that in retrospect, like the anticipation of this thing was super high and people were really optimistic that it might work. We know now it didn't. And like the Zune is a punchline now. But like that whole year from like this thing leaks to the FCC to the launch in November, the like the stakes just keep getting higher. And people are like, this thing might work. It might be huge. This might be as big as the iPod. And it's hard to rewind your brain or if you're younger to like even understand what gadget culture was like back then.

43:34There were no phones. Right. Like phone ecosystems did not exist. Like Engadget and Gizmodo were the first gadget blogs. Yeah. So like everyone was having these experiences for the first time, which is crazy to think about now. Like there was not tech YouTube. So like this was, oh, the battle's being joined. By the big dog, right? Apple's the underdog. The empire's going to strike back. Here we go. And then this thing is just a sensational flop. It's so funny. Sensational flop. I came back from the land of feature phones and just going like, oh, my God, Japan is in the future. Our phones suck.

44:14And I come back for, like, I think my first, like, winter break. And, like, my friend has the Zune. And he's, like, whipping it out of his pocket. And he's like, I got a Zune. So, first of all, shout out to CNET, which gave the Zune an eight. Wow. Classic. Just sort of leave that there. Classic move. But I think I can sort of explain the reviews in two and Gadget stories. And, Neal, I'm curious if either of these jog any memories for you. On November 13th, 2006, Ryan Black posts a very long blog titled, Installing the Zune dot dot dot sucked. Yeah. This is before the review. And it's just a long, basically running diary of trying to set up the Zune software.

44:57And I think this is the story of the Zune, right? For all the ideas it had, for all the things it got right, every bit of getting this thing to work was a disaster. And everybody hated using it, which ultimately is what killed it. So then two days later, he posts the review, and it is ruthless. Like, he just didn't like the Zune at all. I mean, let me just read you a bit from the very beginning. He says, we've got things we like and things we don't. Rough edges to go right along with the well-thought-out niceties. We came away underwhelmed and not at all surprised. And why? The expectations were for Microsoft to deliver a Microsoft player and system.

45:34Maybe not too shabby looking, but not very usable and definitely bug-ridden, which is a brutal burn of Microsoft, but also true. But everyone hoped Microsoft had got it right this time. Eschewed patterns of old and gotten a fresh start with new blood willing to think about things from outside the staid culture. But that just wasn't the case. It's a Microsoft product through and through. Yep. Brutal. Brutal. Brutal. But also pretty telling. I do love that Ryan still wrote in the Royal Wii. That was a real thing. Oh, yeah. We changed that later. So let me just remind you of some things people did not like about the Zune.

46:04You in particular, Neal, I will find very funny. It didn't support plays for sure. You just couldn't use Microsoft's DRM. Oh, their platform. Yes. Cool. Everybody had a lot of feelings about file formats. This is like a thing that I became very nostalgic for doing the research is like everybody had a bullet list of the file formats that you can put on this thing. And then we're mad about the two that it didn't support. It was delightful. Did it not support AAC? It did not support AAC. That's right. So the entire iTunes store is incompatible. That's right. And people were very upset about it. It didn't support the Mac, which wasn't like a giant deal for a Microsoft product at the time.

46:39But people were so bummed. It didn't have podcasts. In terms of video, it only supported MWV. Only. That was the only one. Drove people nuts. So this thing, again, it's like there's so many things about it that were almost there. And none of them were there. The other thing a lot of people said, to your point at the very beginning, everybody wished it had the click wheel. Like everybody was like, we have figured out what works here and it is the click wheel. Why is anybody doing anything else? Fascinating. And it's like Apple patent number 607. Right. Let me just read you one more quote from a review.

47:18This is from Digital Trends, which gave it half a star. Wow. It says, The Microsoft Zune is one of those products that you will want to avoid at all costs, at least this first generation. In comparison to other media players on the market, the Zune offers no clear advantage. It has an audio and video library with less depth than iTunes, while the player itself has fewer features than offerings from Apple, Samsung, or Creative. Microsoft, like, tried to do so much and didn't actually do very much at all. It's like kind of a wild outcome of this device. Truly fascinating. And also, if you bought something for the Zune, you couldn't play it anywhere else.

47:49Very good. Here's this, like, really interesting thing, like, this middle zone. Apple did exactly one thing well. Like, a really funny thing about the iPod is every iPod was essentially the exact same product. Except for the one iPod shuffle that had no screen and no buttons. That one was different, and that didn't work. But like the iPod and then the iPod Mini and the iPod Nano, same interface, same menus, same wheel, played some music. By the end, they added Snake. And every year, and I've talked to Tony Fidel who ran the iPod project at Apple for years, they just made it look different. And Microsoft was like, we'll do half of everything.

48:30Half of everything is like the Microsoft story in so, so many ways. They didn't listen to Ron Swanson when he said whole ass thing. Whole ass thing. They don't have to ask multiple things. They didn't listen to Ron Swanson. So despite all of that, this thing eventually became the most popular non-Apple media player, which I guess is like – It's just because it's Microsoft. Well, yeah. It's like saying it's the most popular non-Google search engine. Like, congratulations. You know what I mean? Yeah, there's that. But it's also like at the time Apple would like try to pretend its competition was like SanDisk.

49:02Right. You know, like whatever, guys. Yeah. Yeah. So I'm just going to I'm going to blow through the history. We will. The Zune HD was like peak Zune. But I just have a fun a bunch of fun notes about what happened and how Microsoft tried to really make the Zune happen because it hit like 10 percent market share. And that was the highest it ever got. Right. So if you're Microsoft, you look at this and you can either say we're a 10 percent market share. Oh, no, this thing sucks. Or you say we're a 10 percent market share. Let's like pour fuel on the fire. See if we can really make this work. That's what Microsoft decides to do.

49:32So they did things like they launched Zune 3.0, the big software update in 2008, and they tried to juice sales by giving owners free Wi-Fi at McDonald's. This is their big promotion. If you got a Zune, you could use Wi-Fi at McDonald's. To squirt one song. To squirt your songs. Oh, no. This is also the year, by the way, the Zune 80 came out and you have 500 Joy Division Zunes. Yep. Which worked. Steve Jobs quaking in his boots. This was right around the same time Microsoft appointed 200 different people as Zune masters. Oh, yeah. And it gave them all a bunch of like Zune swag. There's a lot of Zune swag out in the world.

50:11Like a surprising number of people have Zune t-shirts still. There's that one guy famously got a Zune tattoo. We covered every ounce of his existence in the gadget. We interviewed him. Years later, I think they went back to him and were like, are you good? That's great. Wait, he still has it? You didn't cover it up? It's 2025. I don't know what happened to this gentleman. If you're out there, get at us. We'd love to hear from you. But Zune Tattoo Guy was a character on the pages of Imagine Gizmodo. Oh, yeah. So it's all kind of happening. And then another thing I had forgotten was, do you remember when all the Zunes failed?

50:45No. So December 31st, 2008, all the Zunes failed. Because it was a leap year. Zunepocalypse. And the Zunes' internal clock was not prepared for a leap year. It Y2K'd. And so it eventually fixed itself 24 hours later. But they also like had a software thing you could do to update it. But it just it did not understand the idea of a leap here. So they all just broke. And that's one of those things that I think you never really come back from reputationally. And Microsoft never did. So 2009, the ZuneHD comes out. Microsoft discontinues the old one. But already by then, this is 2009, it's over, right?

51:32Everybody decides to get out of it. GameStop, which had been selling Zunes, decides to get out. But yeah, what has happened by 2009? Smartphones. It's all over. Smartphones. So, right. So, at this point, the iPhone is out. Smartphones are, like, ascendant. And very famously, this is the time at which Microsoft makes very clear that it thinks all of this mobile stuff is nonsense. Let me play you. This is from 2007. This is a Steve Ballmer clip. This is a classic Ballmer. This is a Steve Ballmer clip talking about the iPhone. In the case of music and entertainment players, Apple absolutely has a preeminent position.

52:04We said we want to be in this market. There's a lot of reasons why there's synergy with other things that we're doing. We think we've got some unique innovations, particularly what we're doing with community, with wireless networking. And we came into the market, a market in which they're very strong. And we took, I don't know, I think most estimates would say we took about 20, 25 percent of the high end of the market. We weren't down at some of the lower price points, but for devices,$249 and over, we took, you know, let's say about 20 percent of the market. So I feel like we're in the game. We're driving our innovation hard.

52:36And we're not the incumbent. He's the incumbent in this game. But at the end of the day, he's going to have to keep up with an agenda that we're going to drive as well. What? Yeah. Do you think he ever thinks about that? And this is the same interview where later he was like, we$500 for a smartphone. He laughed at the iPhone. This is all the same interview. So this is Ballmer doubling down on the Zune after the iPhone came out. Like that's where it all falls apart. You're going to have to keep up with the Zune with the iPod that you are rapidly cannibalizing with the iPhone. That you have absolutely immediately destroyed.

53:07So this happens. By 2011, Microsoft is just completely out of the business. It just decides to stop doing this. The iPod Touch is out. Fun fact, for a long time, people were out there being like, where's the Zune Touch? We want the Zune Touch. and that was... No. When you say people, would you say more than a dozen? There were some Zune heads. Listen, there were some Zune heads out there. I just want to put everyone back into this mindset. Like, yes, now phones are out. Android is on the rise. Like, you are starting to get the real fanboy wars in gadget culture, right? Like, fandoms around these companies are starting to form in a way that maybe you get iOS versus Android now to some extent, even though that's calmed down.

53:51But like back then you had like Team Microsoft. Like we started The Verge and we had forums. We called it the Microsoft tribe. Like we were in it. And like people wanting a Zoom touch was like, we want you in the game against Apple. And now it's just kind of like, well, the App Store is going to kill everything. Like it's just, it was such a different moment. It was partially also because like I was still in Japan at this point in time and the iPhone was not like coming over right away. And so the feature phone makers there were like not at all. They were kind of balmery about all of this happening.

54:25But they were all also integrating music, right? Like I remember you could play music on all those feature phones. You could play music on all of them. You could pay for your Subway on all of them. That was like the coolest thing. I was like, I can pay for things with my phone. Like this was back in 2007, 2008. A lot of people in Japan didn't see any freaking reason to get a smartphone. So I remember I had an iPod Touch and a Japanese feature phone. And I had them at the same time. And for a long time, that's what a lot of people in Asia did. They 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.

55:05So, like, you saw these devices just kind of, like, eek along longer in Japan. But eventually, everyone just got a smartphone. Yeah, that's how it goes. And it just happened. And I think even in that transition, it was clear that that was where it was going to end. It was like this might take a while to get there, but ultimately it's pretty obvious that these two things are one. I held out for a really long time. I didn't get my first iPhone until 2012 because I was just double fisting a iPod Touch just for the apps and then my Japanese phone because I could do everything on these two things. And it was just like I have no desire for an iPhone.

55:43And then once I got the iPhone, I did a little song. I called it my iPhone song. I was like, I got an iPhone. I got an iPhone. I'm walking down the streets of Ginza and going, like, iPhone, I got an iPhone. I'm so happy. And then I was like, bye. So Microsoft spends this whole time ignoring the existence of smartphones. Great job, Microsoft. But also— No, they put the honeycomb launcher on Windows Mobile 6.5. That was the thing I had to contend with as a gadget blogger. That is a sentence that you just said. Sure did. Sure. They sure did that. But at the same time, they're also like getting out of the Zune business and they all blamed each other, which I thought was very funny.

56:19So all the product people blamed the marketing people for making insane ads about birds that didn't explain what the Zune was. Yeah. By the way, Zune Tattoo Guy was considering getting a tattoo of the flaming birds. I just want to give you an update from all the thread. All the product people blamed the marketing people. The music industry people blamed Microsoft for not executing well. Microsoft blamed the music industry for not promoting Zune enough. There's just this years-long blame game all the way up until 2015 when it fully dies. And we're going to take a break, but first I just want to play you the last hurrah of the Zune, which was Guardians of the Galaxy.

56:53Oh, what? It made a comeback, and it was something special from 2017. Pete!

57:03Captain found this for you in a junker shop. Said you'd come back to the bulb someday. Honestly, it's called a Zune. It's what everybody's listening to on Earth nowadays. It's got 300 songs on it. 300 songs? 100 songs? Oh, my God. Yeah, when you become a punchline in Guardians of the Galaxy in 2017, it's a tough beat. Oh, my God. So that was the end of the Zune. It didn't miss by much, but it also missed by a lot. All right, we've got to take one more Rick, and then we're going to come back, and we're going to do the version of History Questions. Be right back.

57:37Morning, Zoe. Jeff Bridges. Why are you still living above our garage? I want to be in a T-Mobile commercial like you. Teach me, Sildana. I couldn't possibly. At T-Mobile, get the new iPhone 17 Pro on them. It's designed to be the most powerful iPhone yet and has the ultimate pro camera system. Impressive. Let me try. At T-Mobile, you can save up to 20 % versus the other big guys. You heard them. T-Mobile is the best place to get the new iPhone 17 Pro on us with eligible trade-in in any condition. Check them out to see how much you can save versus the other big guys at T-Mobile.com slash switch.

58:08All right, we're back. So on every episode of Virgin History, we have eight questions we ask. We're going to go through them all. Question number one, what was the best thing about the Zune? Neela, you go first. Okay. It was almost nothing. But it's not the Zune itself. Okay. The interface of the Zune, they didn't call it that back then, but it was the beginning of the Metro design language, which carried forth into Windows Phone, which carried forth into Windows itself. And now everything is kind of Metro. Like everything looks like the Zune interface. and they got that idea right. They executed it totally wrong and it was slow and impossible to use.

58:44But that was the best thing about the Zune. Yeah, I mean, that was going to be my answer too, is the home screen. I think that the typography-based home screen that is actually designed, because the Apple thing was purely, it just looked like a file system. It just was a file system. Like Microsoft actually tried and I appreciated that. Do you have a different answer? Slightly, because I also agree that that was actually the first thing that ever caught my eye about the Zune, but don't laugh at me. Brown was the right choice. No, it wasn't. Brown was the right choice. Because it was different.

59:15And like it gave it a different feel. But there's other colors. No, there are other colors. But 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. This gave me more of like, I mean, when you feel it, it doesn't feel luxe. But when you look at it in someone's hand with the Metro design, it was just like, ooh, fancy. I will say having, I had probably not touched a Zune in 15 years. And then I got this one and pulled it out. And my immediate instinct was like, oh, this is kind of nice. Like, it's like nice to hold.

59:45It kind of feels like. In a way that even iPods were never really that nice to hold. They were very, like, sharp and angular. And, like, they were beautiful pieces of machinery. But they weren't, like, comfy in a way that just was kind of comfy. Look, you all can feel whatever you want about your brown Zune. All right, the market spoke. 2025 Pantone color. What is it? Mocha Moose. We're so back. We're so back. All right. Question number two. What was the worst thing about this? There's so many things. V, you got to pick one. I think the fact that you couldn't use it as a hard drive back then was like a really big one for me as like a deciding factor why I was not going to jump off like team iPod at that time because just I just always had a bazillion different hard drives and flash drives on me.

1:00:32And again, I cared about my music library curation. So the fact that I couldn't actually do that. Not enough. Not to Neelai's degree of caring about my music library curation. But also I thought they did the album art well. That was like my pet peeve, just finding the correct album art for my music library curation, but also not up to Neelai's standards. It's just the text. These aren't high standards. It was high. I don't like filling out the meta in WordPress. Yes, why would I fill out the meta? It all comes through. 30 years later, we're still battling about metadata. So you think it's just the hard drive thing?

1:01:11That was one thing. But then also, I just never understood why I didn't use Windows Media Player. Like, they created a whole other software for it. Yeah, it's really true. All right, question number three. Oh, wait, you didn't say what the worst thing was. Oh, it was by far the software. Like, there's the Zune itself. And then you're like, you have to use the software on your computer. And all of that was like a mess. Yeah, that was going to be my answer, too, is the trying to get music from my computer to the Zune. 400 times more complicated than it felt like it needed to be. Yeah. Whereas like at some point, Apple, you just drag the thing and it's probably fine.

1:01:46All right. Question number three. Would it have been a bigger hit if Apple made it? Yes. The obvious answer is yes, because they did. They did. And it's called the iPod. But I'm saying if Apple made the Zune with all the ideas of the Zune, could it have pulled it off? No. And because they looked at all the ideas for the Zune and just rejected them out of hand. Steve Jobs famously wrote Thoughts on DRM and basically just like roasted the music industry for even thinking that DRM was a good idea. They eventually caved on subscription services, but they knew the technology wasn't there at that time.

1:02:22Right. Yeah, you've got to assume there was a meeting at Apple like every six months about like should we do a music subscription? And everybody's like, well, no, it's impossible. because of the file-based DRM that they had at the time. Until streaming happened, I don't think subscriptions were ever on the table for Apple. Yeah, all these ideas were, like, good, and they were too early, and they were, like, not, the technology was not there to support them, and Microsoft was looking for an edge. So it did all the stuff Apple wasn't doing, but Apple wasn't doing that stuff for a reason. And this isn't just, like, Apple was always right.

1:02:54It was, there was one singular figure at Apple who Apple doesn't have this kind of attitude anymore. But Steve Jobs would be like, I can't make this as good as I want it, so we're not going to make it at all. Like it's just not going to happen until it's good enough for me. Right. And 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. Yeah. Like you end up choosing not to do these things. And that's the only reason you don't do these things. Yeah. Do you agree? Yeah. We don't think Apple could do it. No. The Apple Zune doesn't have a great ring to it.

1:03:25No, the Apple Zune doesn't have a great ring to it. But like like Neil I said at that time, I just think they would have been like, we could do it, but we won't. OK, new question. Do you think a brown iPod would have sold? You know what?

1:03:39Yes, because they would have chose the correct iPod. Do you think that brown iPod would have sold? That would not have sold. That did not fit. But see, like that would have never happened because it just didn't fit into the design language of the colors that they chose. You have to remember this is – I always talk about the local news test on the Vergecast. Like they were just doing stuff to try to get coverage on the local news because that's what people were watching back then. There wasn't a YouTube whatever. Like you needed some like gimmicky morning zoo crew anchor to be like, and it comes in brown.

1:04:10Like literally they were doing things to attract that kind of attention whether or not anyone ever bought the brown one. Whereas Apple would just be like, it's skinny now. And like that would work. You know, like it was just a very different time to try to attract attention with these products. Totally. All right. Next question. If you could go back and make it yourself, what would you do differently? Obviously, the answer is lots of things, but I'm going to make you each pick one. Like if you wanted to make the Zune work, give me one thing you would have changed. Neil, you go first. I would have made it do even fewer things.

1:04:43Interesting. Okay. Right. If 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. Right? And 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. Instead 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. Right? And, like, they didn't ever finish that thought. Instead, they were, like, off doing squirting, whatever they're doing.

1:05:22Yeah. We're getting an explicit tag on this podcast. Jesus Christ. What about you? What would you change? The software. I would make it easy to use because, like, you know, just think about, like, what the whole thing about Apple is, right? It just works. It's easy to use. Like, your tech-addled grandma could figure it out. The fact that there were stories talking about how hard it was to install. I have ADHD. I do not have that patience to go and sit there and be like, I want this. Most people are just going to give up and go like, oh, that's not worth it. So 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.

1:06:09instead 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. So, like. So, wait, your answer is I would make it good? No, like, to be more specific, I think I would just make the software good. Yeah. Yeah, make the software good. Big idea from VSON. Yeah. That's great. Just don't suck. That's my idea. This is a time in software where Apple was really focused on making beautiful software and everyone else was like, here's some stuff. And like Apple and its whole attitude, we live in the world that Apple created. Even Microsoft, you know, every Microsoft event is like, look at what our designers did.

1:06:50And like this was their first attempt at it. And I think they were like, it should be pretty. And no one was like, does it work? I mean, like, you know, even if you just wanted to jerry-frig it, I'm bringing Windows Media Player back. You could have just done it through there. And that's something people, even if it's finicky, they're familiar with. They know it. It'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. So 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.

1:07:23Yeah. 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. Because I think if you can solve, if you can make squirting. Oh, God. 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. If 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 because it's like, that's how you become very powerful.

1:07:59I 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. But 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. So that's what I would have done. It wouldn't have worked. Yeah, it's real hard to be like, let's look back at the Zune and see what would have worked. The next question is, what feature of this thing should every current version have? What would you pull off of the Zune and put onto media players or even your phone in 2025?

1:08:33FM radio. That's mine too. We're on the way. We're locked in today. Wow. That was the feature I cared the least about. I have come all the way back around on radio. Like, 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. And I'm going to listen to that for 10 minutes. This is such a theme with David. All right. So for us, it's FM radio. It's not for you, V. What do you think? I actually think that the thing that should be on everything is on everything now because I think the Zoom pass was the smartest idea they had, kind of.

1:09:02And it actually is on everything now. So next question is the one I have thought about the most with the Zune. And it's is there an alternate timeline in which this thing was more or even more successful? Can you like Thanos snap Apple away? No, but you can you can ship it earlier or ship it later. But you can't just take Apple off the board. No. Then no. Maybe. I think it's timing. Like if they had figured it out, I just think Microsoft's inherent curse is timing. They always have some good ideas, but never at the time where they should have the ideas. So, like, I think maybe there's a timeline where it comes out and maybe it's early enough that the iPod is not caught on yet.

1:09:42And some people just for whatever reason, people really love this thing still in 2025. So maybe, maybe, but it's a big maybe. That was the only thing I could think of is, like, if it had been four years earlier. And, you know, Gates sends that email the day after the first iPod and not the fourth iPod. I think he sent a lot of emails about Steve Jobs that had that tone. He's like, he's done it again. This is strange. What are you guys doing? Like, can't we make nice things? There's a lot of those emails from Bill Gates over the years. I don't think so. I think Microsoft as a company during that time was organized around essentially business development.

1:10:20Right? Like, the thing Microsoft did was make deals. Yeah. And the thing Apple did was make products. And so I'm saying you got to take Apple off the board because every other company was also like a deal-making company. And so you get this weird halfway DRM label licensing, blah, blah, blah, because that's what the lawyers and the MBAs wanted. Question number seven. Could you reboot it now? Oh, they definitely could. You'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.

1:10:54But like, why would you? I mean, I guess you could in the sense that there's like a nostalgia for that time period right now. Like the Canon G7X is a thing where I thought we like got rid of point and shoots and then the children are just like, no, it was better back then. So maybe you could have people rebooting it from a sense of nostalgia. But do I think they could reboot it and it would have the degree of success that the Razer Motorola foldable phones have right now? No. Right. Yeah, I mean, I think like could you make and sell a like limited edition 20th anniversary Zune? A 20th anniversary Joy Division with 300 versions.

1:11:31You see what I'm saying? Make 5 ,000 of them. Could you sell 5 ,000 of them? I think yes, for sure. Is there a world in which the Zune becomes like a hit product? I don't think so. I think a lot of people really like the idea of having a dedicated music player again. And I don't think that many people actually want a dedicated music player again. Yeah, because even your phone, if you get rid of all your apps, is going to play music. Right. Like 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. And you're like, oh, intellectually, that's kind of a cool idea.

1:12:04And then you get into the car and you're like, oh, that is just my phone. I did that already. I tend to agree. All right. So last question. Does the original Zune belong in the Version History Hall of Fame? Yes. Yes. Wow. Yes. Okay. Yes. Yes. And I will say the rubric essentially is just did this thing matter in some important way in the history of it? It doesn't have to have been great or awful or vastly successful. It just has to have mattered. This is like a case study. I think we've proved in the last however long we've been talking about Microsoft. This is like if you want to know about Microsoft at this point in time, all you have to do is study the Zune.

1:12:40And like you will understand everything about Microsoft from that point in time. So, yeah, it does. I mean, it's in the Guardians of the Galaxy movie. It's true. It was also in the Big Bang Theory. The Simpsons did it. There's a lot. You could play Doom on it. We found that out. It kind of hits all the beats. You agree? I agree. I agree with what V said. Like, this is just a perfect picture of Microsoft. It's also the tech industry and the entertainment and culture industries collided, and their inability to see each other resulted in the Zoom. Like, you can just see that, like, they don't like each other.

1:13:16Yeah. And the products they want to make and the products they allow each other to make are brown soon. Here you go. So we're putting – Specifically the brown soon is going. I was going to say we're putting the brown one in the Hall of Fame specifically. Oh, absolutely the brown one. Okay. And I would even bring that forward to now, right? The character of Steve Jobs in the history of computing did a lot of things, accomplished a lot of things. The number one thing that Steve Jobs had that even our current CEOs do not have is he understood the artists. He cared about them. He gave a shit. How many times have you seen a clip of Steve Jobs being like, I really cared about proportional fonts.

1:13:53And then Microsoft copied them for me, right? And 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. He was able to go to the artists themselves and connect with them and build great products because he respected them. And that Microsoft just couldn't do it for the longest time. They got a little bit better at it, but still they're not as good as Apple. And then now you've got the new crop of CEOs who are like, here's what we did. We trained all of our AI and your shit for free, and now we just make it, and you get nothing.

1:14:23And it's like, oh, we've lost something along the way. And the Zune is a case study of, like, the first glimmer of making it pretty isn't enough. You got to go get the work. And I think Microsoft, they faceplanted so hard, they kind of had to learn that lesson. I like it. I agree. I thought I was going to have to fight both of you to get in the Hall of Fame, but we're unanimous. This is very exciting. So into the rafters. I don't know. The Hall of Fame is going to need a physical instantiation at some point, but we'll figure that out. It's not just this room. It might just be this room. All right.

1:14:56That is it for the show. We are done here. V and Eli, thank you so much for doing this. This was a delight. Put the joy to visions you in a way before something bad happens to it. This is very important. Thank you, as always, for being here with us. This thing is going to send my kid to college one day. Oh, my God. You know, I think you could get$5 ,000 for that. Original packaging. That pays for college. Yeah. It's going to be great. All right. Thank you, as always, for being here with us. As ever, you can watch all of our episodes on YouTube. You can listen to them wherever you get podcasts.

1:15:22And if you want to support all this, including the purchasing of more Joy Division Zunes, the best way to do so is to subscribe to TheVerge.com. We'll see you next time. Thanks for being here. Will you ever turn it on? I would have to take the sticker off. Oh, okay. So that's a no.

1:15:41Version History is produced by Victoria Barrios, River Branson, Owen Grove, Brandon Kiefer, Travis Larchuk, Eric Gomez, Andrew Marino, and Alex Parkin. Studio support from Chris Shurtleff. Our theme music is composed by Brandon McFarland. Be sure to subscribe to the new Version History podcast feed to get all of our new episodes as soon as they arrive.

1:16:25The New iPhone 17 Pro in any condition. Check them out and see how much you can save versus the other big guys at tmobile.com slash switch.