Do You Zune?

Such frustrations led technology and marketing consultant Grahm Skee to start the Web site AnythingButiPod.com two years ago. "The whole thing came about as a joke and it kind of turned into my job," he says. Today the site's forum has 25,000 registered contributors, many of them obsessive when it comes to their players of choice and very specific about the sundry demerits of the different iPods.

Skee owns, he says, almost every MP3 player available. "The first version of the Zune was half baked," he says. "They just wanted to get something on the market." Skee, who has consulted with Microsoft and other devicemakers, speculates that Microsoft appears to have replicated what it did with the Xbox 360—rushed to market, learned from crabby customer feedback and kept tinkering away to improve it.

And yet, Microsoft hasn't been able to make the Zune hip. "My son has an iPhone and several iPods," says Robert Scoble, an influential tech blogger and former Microsoft mouthpiece. "We have a Zune; it's just not cool enough. It doesn't have the killer feature. Something I can show my friends and say, 'Hey, check this out'." Scoble says Gates's own remarks suggest the company is approaching the market from a defensive position: iPod users have the occasional nasty habit of becoming Mac converts. "If iPods were all Apple was doing, Microsoft wouldn't care," he says.

The end result is that being a Zune fan can be a lonely undertaking. Nathan Webb, editor of Zunescene.com (15,500 registered forum members), may not know anyone outside of his immediate family who owns one—"I don't have any [friends] that own a Zune," he says. But the Mead, Colo., mechanical engineer is still going to buy two of them when they hit stores sometime in mid-November. "I didn't hardly sleep on the night they made the announcement," he says. "I tried to go to bed after updating the site but I couldn't. I was too excited for it." No doubt, a sentiment Gates can find encouraging. But it's unlikely to keep either the fake Steve Jobs or the real one awake at night.

© 2007