Version History: Zune

Hey, it's your friend David Pierce, and I'm here to tell you before we get started that this is the halfway point of the first season of Version History. We're four episodes in, we've got four more to do, and we're already working on the next batch. And like we said at the beginning, these first eight episodes are all going to be on the VergeCast feed, the Version History feed, and the YouTube channel. So you can watch them and listen to them anywhere, and the next several, however you've been getting them, you can keep getting them. But after the first eight episodes, they're going to leave the VergeCast feed, and the only way to get the podcast is going to be on the Version History feed. It'll keep being on the Verge's YouTube channel. So if you're watching there, you're good there. But please, please, please go subscribe to the Version History feed. Like, I'll just level with you.

That is the feed that we care most about growing, especially in these early days. And that is the thing that we can grow in order to continue to be able to do this and to grow the show and keep doing new things with it. I care deeply about how that feed is going. I hate looking at numbers and I look at that number more than I'm proud of. So if you can go subscribe to Version History wherever you get podcasts, it will mean a great deal to me and all of us. And it will make sure that you keep getting every single episode as soon as it's released. I will stop giving you my speech now and we will just get into Version History. Thank you as always. Enjoy the show.

It's the early 2000s, and all you want to do is listen to some music. Best case scenario, you have the money to afford an iPod, and even more money to afford songs at 99 cents apiece. Worst case scenario, you have like a MP3 player with a dying hard drive that you are desperately trying to keep alive. Maybe you're running around with a binder full of CDs like it's the 90s. Well, I have a better answer. It's a new device from Microsoft, and it lets you play music, listen to the radio, watch videos, look at pictures, and even share stuff with your friends. It's called the Zune, and it is going to kill the iPod. From The Verge and Vox Media, this is Version History, a show about the best and worst and strangest and most important products in tech history.

Today, we're talking music and all of the ways the Zoom did not, in fact, kill the iPod. Support for the show comes from Sonos. Most of us here at The Verge are big movie buffs. When watching at home, I don't want that experience to be any less immersive than it would be in a theater. And sound plays a huge role in that. The Verge has actually published a few pieces over the years about how much sound matters to a movie. From headphones to sound bars, a Sonos system pulls you in. So far, you might actually think the phone call is coming from inside the house. Visit Sonos.com and build your system. Sonos. Love the sound. Feel the system.

All right, we're back. Let's talk Zoom. V-Song is here. V, hello. Hello. Nilay Patel is here. Nilay, hello. Hello. Two very different Zoom experiences in the room, which I'm very excited about. Did either of you have the first Zoom? No, I was too poor. Did you want the first Zoom? I did want one. Yeah. Yes, because Zoom comes out 2006. I'm a young, bushy-eyed 18-year-old flying off to Tokyo to do the next seven years in Tokyo. My iPod, the one with the video, was a piece of it. I had dropped it so much. That thing was expensive, too. That's tough. So, you know, I wanted something that was different. I really did not like iTunes back then.

still don't. I was going to say, iTunes was never good. So, you know, we're already beefing. iTunes is a perfect piece of software. At least like 2006 iTunes is a perfect piece of software. No. Anywho. Yeah. So like my audiophile friends were all like into the Zune and they had it and I was like, oh, it's brown. That's special. And then the interface looked cool and it had the cool typeface and I was like, oh, I would love to have one, but I'm poor. At least you had an iPod. I had like a creative Zen something or other that was like a spinning hard drive inside of a box about, you know, the size of two minutes. Oh, you were fancy. You had a hard drive. Oh, yeah. It was the whole thing.

I went for the big one. It was either get a mini disc player. And it looked like a fake CD player. But they just played the tiny little ones and there was one that you could strap on your belt. That was awesome. I wanted that. Couldn't afford that. So I got like a used, literally it was the size of like.

I don't know, like an iPad. I had a Rio. Okay. The little purple one that was like ergonomic so you could like hold it. Oh, yeah. You know, it was like, it was shaped. Was that the one that had the tiny little horizontal screen on it? It was like a horizontal screen but it was inside of an oval that was slanted. Oh, I do remember this. I tried to fake the way it looked but like inside it was just another segmented LCD screen and it held approximately 10 songs because it was like SD cards or whatever. It was great. I loved it. So, you and I both brought Zunes today. Mine, I just bought.

I bought a brown iPod on eBay. Was this your Zune, like your OG Zune? No, I bought it on eBay for the show. It was $59. And I've spent a lot of time trying to decide if I got a good deal or a terrible deal. You know, it retained a surprising amount of its value for being a 20, almost 20-year-old device. Right? I was going to say it retained a surprising amount of its brown. It's still super brown. I just want to say genuine kudos to whoever had this thing before me. I mean, there's thousands of songs on here. And whoever it is has pretty sick music taste. But I would like to read you a complete list of the playlists on this Zune that I bought on eBay. It powers up.

I mean, I'm impressed. It turns on. What's the charger? It is Microsoft's version of the 30-pin charger. It's good stuff. There's one playlist called Christian Songs. We have Christmas. We have Easter. We have First. And we have Zune Gems. Zune Gems. And there are like 30 songs in Zune Gems and I have never heard of any of them. What's in the Easter list? What's in the First list? Oh my gosh, there's so many options. It takes forever to scroll around this thing. Easter and Christmas are empty.

which is very bleak and sad. So one thing I want to point out here is David struggling to use the interface of the Zune. Oh, this is brutal. I'm assuming only hardcore Zune nerds are going to listen to this episode of Virgin History. But for some reason, you've stumbled into it. The innovation of the iPod was the wheel. Yes. By far, this was the big innovation. The first iPod had a literal mechanical wheel that you would turn to scroll up and down the menus. Phil Schiller, this was his idea at Apple. And Apple had a patent on it, and then they had a patent on the click wheel, which is where the iPod ended up. This is crazy. This is all, if you think about it. Fun fact, V picked the brown Zune up off my desk this morning, and the very first thing she says is, oh, I've...

Forgot it didn't have a click wheel. I forgot. I just, muscle memory. 20-year-old muscle memory just going. I was like, why no scroll? Oh. Right. It's the defining interface element of that time, as Apple invented the click wheel. Microsoft couldn't use it, but I've had it on it. So they made it a circle, and it's a swipey touch circle. And it has the exact problem that Apple solved with a click wheel, which is that it's slow. And they just ran right into it being slow. And it's also, it's a very left-right interface. So there's like, it has like a menu at the top where you go across all the different kinds of like filters and music and all that stuff. And then it goes up and down as you scroll stuff. But then you go to the home screen, which is up and down. It's like.

Trying to map the interface of the Zune is insanity. That said, I go to the home screen and you mentioned the typeface. The typeface. Lovely. Lots and lots of Zune persists to this day across the entire industry. The Zune design became a lot of what Windows became and then eventually what everything became. There's lots of Zune that's good, but it's just very funny that they ran head first into the problem that Apple solved with the click wheel. Yeah. And you also brought a Zune. I brought a Zune. I brought a very special Zune. So this is a period of weird exclusives across the industry. Somehow the Zune team decided that what would save the Zune in 2008 is producing 500.

limited edition Joy Division Zunes. You know, Joy Division, famously the biggest band in the world. Everyone has a t-shirt. Very few people have the records. It's like basically how that goes. So they were like, we're just going to put the Unknown Pleasure sticker on a Zune and then people will be confused and they'll buy that. But then we have to make it real. So they hired Peter Saville, who was Joy Division and the Order's like main designer, to design the whole thing. It is a habit. And I'm just saying that he designed the whole thing because I don't have a Joy Division Zune. To properly preserve it, you have to have the box it shipped in because it's so outrageous.

So I have the whole thing. This is the box that arrived. So you got this in 2008. In 2008, this is the box that arrived at my apartment in Chicago. It is huge. This is like fine jewelry that we're opening. This is fine jewelry. And then you pull out the actual Joy Division Zune. This is Zune 80. It's like the second generation. I have number 154, 500. I've never taken the sticker off. I've never turned it on, but it has the full Joy Division catalog on it. It says warning explicit content on it, which is deeply hilarious. And on the back, again, the Unknown Pleasure logo, it says Peter Savile for Joy Division, the documentary limited edition. And it's just a Zune 80.

See, this is nice. My brown one is like kind of plasticky and gross. This one is like... The Zune 80 was really, really nice. You could beat somebody up with this thing. I have not looked on eBay to see how much it's worth now. Let's do this. Will you just look on eBay for Joy Division Zune? What do you think it's worth now? The last time I looked, they were trending between $500 and $1,000. Oh, and how much did you pay for it? I paid the list price. It was probably like $350 or something. Okay, I found one for sale. It is $2,099. And there are 33 watchers. Oh my God. People want this stuff. You're going to sell it? Is it worth it? We'll see. We're going to wait for it to keep... I mean, you have it, though, in the original packaging. That's true. Unopened.

I'm turned on with a sticker on it. I feel like there's like a 40% chance this is you just trying to like get my interest for your own eBay listing. Finally, you've caught me. I am eBay boy 29. Love that for you. So, all right, so let's go back and tell some sort of Zune history here. I did way more research for this than I needed to and found that basically none of this story was what I expected. So I'm curious if this all matches what y'all remember because it's not what I remember. But I think we have to go back to like 2003 just to like set the scene a little bit. At this point, Apple obviously is like dominant. There are a lot of other MP3 players out there, but Apple is like the one. The stat I found was that Apple had somewhere between half and 75% of the digital media player market and 70% of digital music sales. So like it was winning. 2004 was also...

the first anniversary of the iTunes store, which was later than I remembered for all of that happening. iTunes was going very well. 2004, Apple launches the fourth-gen iPod and the iPod Mini. They had click wheels. Microsoft at this point has nothing. Just nothing. Well, no, they had Windows Media Store. Like, they had launched a store. But there was MSN Music. MSN Music, but they launched, like, a DRM store with a bunch of music labels. And they were trying to do a very Microsoft thing. Yeah. Right? Which is like, we're not going to make anything. We're going to let other stores use our DRM and an ecosystem of players and software will interface with Windows.

then that will be good. And in a very different world than the one that the iPod totally dominated, that could have maybe possibly made sense, but it immediately didn't seem to work. But just in setting the scene, I have two clips I want to play for you. The first is from G4 TV doing a comparison of the best MP3 players on the market. And I would just like to play this for you. Okay. Well, a posse of new gen sharpshooters have just arrived and they're looking to take over. Now, as they say, this town ain't big enough for two of them, but the iPod ain't going out without a fight, which can only mean a showdown. This newcomer from Bantam, he's only packing a measly two gigs.

As for this Phillips, HDD100. The city's like a slower than a horse and mud. Spoiler alert, the iPod wins. That wasn't even a good iPod. That was the weird third gen with the red buttons over the wheel. Yeah. And then the other one I want to play for you is Steve Jobs. This is the introduction of the iPod Mini in 2004. And he did the thing he always does where he puts up all the ugly ones on a screen and then explains why theirs is better. And he kind of inadvertently perfectly describes the MP3 player market. So let's just check this out.

The high-end flash players, if you pay $200, they hold about 60 songs. If you pay close to $100, they hold 30 songs, and people either do one of two things. They either get a new memory card for it, or they put it in the drawer and don't use it. They also have a really bad user interface. Well, we are going to introduce the second member of the iPod family today to go after these guys. And it's called the iPod Mini.

Kind of a fair description. Like Steve Jobs, good salesman, but it's like, he's not lying about what was going on. You had either these like, you were either on CDs or you had mini discs or you had like flash drives or you had like, I did spinning hard drives because that's fancy. I didn't know that was fancy until just now. But it's like, it's the iPod and then mess for like years. And then simultaneously, Microsoft has launched the Xbox, which works and is like Microsoft's kind of first real consumer hit. And so Microsoft is like- I would say Windows PCs were a consumer hit. Sure, but it's like, it's a hardware product that Microsoft did all in on its own. It was the like most Apple-y consumer product it had made that people liked. And so-

Within Microsoft, there's the sense of like, okay, there's more we can do here. We can blow this out. This is like a thing we know how to do. We're going to go be a huge consumer company, which is the longest running theme I can pick up inside Microsoft. Every two years, they're like, we are a consumer company. Would you like to use Microsoft Teams? And it's like, guys. No, I will never like to use Microsoft Teams for the record. The Xbox is really interesting in this context as well, because it was a Skunkworks project led by an exact name, Jay Allard, who basically was allowed to not use Windows. You're just reading my notes for me. Guess who takes over the Zune project? Our boy Jay Allard. Yeah. So Jay Allard, they start working internally on a project called Zune with Toshiba.

which had been making these devices. Do you remember a thing called the Gigabit? This was an MP3 player. I'm confident that I wrote about the Gigabit. I got nothing on Gigabit. This video, I think, is from Toshiba's booth at CES in 2006 when the Gigabit came out. This is the only place that video came out. Yeah, I think that's right. Let me just quickly play you a commercial of the Gigabit. See if it jogs your memory. Yes. This is the most 1990s that you've ever seen. Yeah. Get your beat going. This is great. People doing handstands. Where was this ad meant to run? I don't know. I've been transported. To make a list of file formats right next to a guy doing a headstand. I don't know what this is.

That's a zoom. That's what you're telling me. Yeah. Oh my God. This device is the basis of this. Yeah.

4,000 photos. Right in the butt. All right. Okay. All right. You get the idea. I'm not sure I get the idea because we've ended on the words. Look at that Windows button. See that Windows button? Yes. This is what I mean. Microsoft was building this like weird ecosystem around its operating system. And the idea was that all of these devices would work with it. And it just never happened. This software was called Portable Media Center. And if there was a piece of software that was ever not going to make it, it's Portable. It was Portable Media Center. One thing that's really interesting because this is the turn for Jay Allard.

this is like fragmentation and ecosystem like craziness at its highest peak. Microsoft was like, we'll make the software, everyone else can make the hardware, someone else will make the service and we'll just sit there and collect taxes from everyone because everyone has to run Windows. And this worked to some extent with Windows and it never worked here. And for years, Steve Jobs would say, no, you have to integrate everything. And I think what Microsoft let Jay Allard do was take runs integrating the products, right? That's the Xbox. That's exactly right. So the one last fun fact about the Gigabit, 2006 CES, Bill Gates gets up on stage and launches this thing in the course of doing other stuff, but this was like a meaningful announcement.

for Microsoft. But so as they're launching this with this video, Microsoft and Toshiba are also working behind the scenes to absolutely just kill this, which is the most Microsoft-y thing. Can you imagine just being the cracked out like Circuit City shopper's agent who like watched this video and was like, that's it. Like a month later, like I was super wrong. Yeah. So this thing comes out and then literally over the course of 2006, it becomes increasingly very obvious that Microsoft is making some, everybody starts calling it an iPod killer, right? Like that's the thing. It's obvious that Microsoft wants to do this. The Zune originally leaked through the FCC as the Toshiba 1089. But for some reason, everybody instantly understood that this was Microsoft's thing. This was like,

It was so clear this is what was coming. This is a time in gadget history. I was in gadget then, and we would publish these FCC filings. Actually, because there were so many leaks that came out of the FCC, there was a rule change made at the FCC so companies could keep their filings from secret for longer. Oh, wow. This is the height of gadget plugging, right? The iPod's out. Digital cameras are having a moment. Gadgets as a category have not yet been subsumed into phones. And Microsoft is doing an iPod killer. It was like, there's nothing better than this. Every day we wake up and we're like, here's one more lick of information about the Microsoft iPod killer. So this is my favorite part, is in June of 2006, Microsoft says...

On the record, specifically, it is not planning on making an iPod killer. And a month later, it launches the Zoom. As it starts telling everybody that it's doing an iPod killer. And apparently, all the other companies, the Toshibas and creatives of the world, were pissed about this. Because as soon as this came out, all their partners who had been working on this software and building stuff on these platforms were totally blindsided by this. And this is such a classic big tech company story. I thought so much about the...

Google Pixel history in thinking about this. We're like, oh, we built this big platform. Everybody's super invested in it. We convinced them all to not make their own software and use ours instead. And now we're going to launch a flagship device. So this is, again, having the big ecosystem versus the integrated product. It comes up over and over again. And what's interesting is Microsoft is always at the center of this debate. Is Microsoft going to make its own PCs? Well, eventually they had to because the ecosystem made everything cheap and crappy and lost to Apple at the high end of the market. So they had to hire one guy, Pana Spine, to go and fix it. There's a really famous email from Bill Gates around the time of the iTunes store where Bill Gates is like, why do we suck? But basically, it's like one of the greatest emails in tech history where he's just like, how did this happen to me again?

Yeah, can I actually just read you this entire email? Bill Gates is very good at email. So this is April 30th of 2003 at 1046 p.m. Wow, 1046, that's deliberate. And there are, let's see, one, two, three, four, five, six, seven people on this email, which is a lot. Says Steve Jobs' ability to focus in on a few things that count, get people who get user interface right, and market things as revolutionary are amazing things. This time, somehow, he has applied his talents in getting a better licensing deal than anyone else has gotten from music. This is very strange to me. The music company's own operations offer a service that is truly unfriendly to the user and has been reviewed that way consistently. Somehow they decide to give Apple the ability to do something pretty good. I remember discussing eMusic and us saying that...

that model was better than subscription because you would know what you were getting. With the subscription, who can promise you that the cool new stuff you want or old stuff will be there? I'm not saying the strangest means we messed up. At least if we did so, so did Reel and PressPlay and MusicNet and basically everybody else. Spoiler alert, they all messed up. Now that Jobs has done it, we need to move fast to get something where the UI and writes are as good. I'm not sure whether we should do this through one of these JVs or not. Yeah, there you go. Which is, I think, where the Toshiba thing starts to happen. I'm not sure what the problems are.

However, I think we need some plan to prove that even though Jobs has us a bit flat-footed again, we move quick and both match and do stuff better. I'm sure people have a lot of thoughts on this. If the plan is clear, no meeting is needed. I want to make sure we are coordinated between Windows DMD, MSN, and other groups. And that's how you know it's like death. It's so mad. Like, I want to make sure I'm coordinated between the multiple silos in my company that hate each other. But the whole plan here is just, this is literally, this is April of 2003. This is the beginning of this whole thing, and he's just like, I don't know what to do, but we have to do the Apple thing. Yeah. That's it. That's the whole line here.

But anyways, okay, so fast forward, we're back into the summer of 2006. So it's taken them three years. Yeah, they're three years here, and they are just starting to tell the world that they are building an iPod killer. And I want to read you some quotes from two things that I found. One is a billboard interview that Chris Stevenson, who was the GM of marketing for MSN Entertainment, and he said, the ability to connect the different devices is a key part of the strategy. Whether it's a portable media device or a phone or the Xbox or Media Center PC, the idea is you can access your entertainment from anywhere. He also said it's going to be, quote, a family of hardware and software products. Like, Zune was not a media player. Zune was like an entertainment universe that Microsoft was trying to build.

Keyword drying. Or at least one marketing guy said in one interview. Let me give you another one. This is Robbie Bach, who ran the entertainment and devices division for Microsoft. He's the guy overseeing all of the parts that put this all together. He did a presentation to financial analysts in July. So 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. Like 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, oh, that's just all right here. Like that's the stuff Microsoft is trying to do.

And it was going to be Zune. That was the thing. Bill Gates came to CS every year. This 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. Like, 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 in 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, 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. No. 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. 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, okay, this is 2006. And Microsoft is like, the big 30,000-foot idea was the right one. What if we make all this stuff social? What if we connect it all? What if we become as much a sort of consumer services business as anything else? It kind of worked. Just not for Microsoft.

The other thing 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. Right. 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 would be 79 cents and some songs would be about 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. So 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. You know who got that deal? Microsoft. Of course. Microsoft offered that deal. So it was UMG in particular, Universal Media Group, that picked that fight and won it. And so one of Microsoft's deals was to give hardware revenues with labels and artists. Fascinating. Didn't work. I have a really great quote from 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. That's the music industry side of this whole story. 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... UMG always has the deals. 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. And 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 isn't 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 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. And they wanted to just essentially do a streaming thing, right? We're like, we're going to be 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 promised us 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? A lot of what you're describing here is Microsoft being so early to good ideas that it couldn't execute them. Yeah. 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. Like, they can do all this stuff because it's streaming it instead of transferring it to big computers. Right, yeah, this whole set of stuff that works over the internet.

doesn't work. Microsoft has never gotten a sense of timing to save its life. It's always too late or too early. It's never just on time. 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. 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. And 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. I 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. Support for the show comes from Framer. If you want to create a website that looks great, feels handcrafted, and comes together fast and seamlessly, then look no further than Framer. It's a complete website platform, not just a builder. So teams can launch and keep improving their sites in one place. It helps creators, teams, and businesses ship production-ready sites faster than ever while getting every detail right. You're able to prompt, inspect, edit, and publish in one place at a whole new pace. On Framer, agents and humans work in tandem. Agents bring speed and scale, while people bring taste, judgment, and control.

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the Zune launches. I'm going to read you the specs. It costs $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. That was it. And Eli, what was the feature called? It was called squirting.

Okay. You could squirt the tracks to each other. Literally, in the marketing materials, they're 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 built the sharing system. Again, 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.

Okay, but how did it get through all of the marketing departments to be called squirting? The same people who lit a bird on fire were 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, you get birds on fire. Squirting, not good. Birds on fire, undecided. I think the idea...

of being able to wirelessly share music with your friends is very cool. The way they did it, though. But literally, as soon as you do the three plays over three days things, you've destroyed it. I mean, at that time, we weren't really doing the whole streaming thing, right? That wasn't a thing. All of these were 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. What on earth were you curating it? No, it was so bad. No, I was not doing it there. I had my own little folder, and everything was named its own little thing on my little part of my... 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. Does this surprise you about any light 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. It'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. You get that one song. The goal was that they would get you to buy it, right? Those ideas that you'd share it and then you'd be like, I love this song. And then you would be like, I will not 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. Which is something. It's just a different, we've come to a different place. So 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, always a picture.

Teens. Maybe. 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. I'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 the general consensus. 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 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. 79. Where 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 it cost the same, but they were hoping that 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? I 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. Like, 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 wireless, but still having to sync, moving files over, then you would, like, send them back. They would expire if, like, you were offline for too long. Like, everything about this subscription service was incompatible with, like, real life. Yes. And the reason people were 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. And 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. 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 Zoom is increasingly like Microsoft was absolutely in the right place at absolutely the wrong time. It 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. You know what I mean? OK, so there's a bunch of other stuff that came with it.

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. 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. People 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. What were the nine albums? Santa Gold.

2006. 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 Zoom, which I think is a cool idea. Microsoft, by the way, has kind of, like, notably good taste in music. It 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. You were at Engadget, and Gadget had a review unit. Do you remember this at all? Oh, it makes 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. Let me just play you a montage we made of some of these interviews.

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? That's not enough for me. I'm not sure if it's something I'd be interested in because of the size of the hard drive, but 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. The cool things has a radio in it, if that means anything to you. But the real cool thing is it has Wi-Fi. So 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? Right. And then I can play it three times.

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 music downloaded directly from Zoom. Zoom's new online music store only offers about two million songs. iTunes has three and a half 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.

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 stuff. 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. She was also just so...

We didn't know how to do it back then. 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 it. 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. Literally, everyone was like, this is the first time anyone has ever read a gadget. What should we do?

I guess we're just going to look, we're going to do the fake Midwestern accent, we're going to look dead on the camera, and we're going to say, this is very bad. It is funny to remember that in retrospect. The anticipation of this thing was super high, and people were really optimistic that it might work. We know now it didn't, and the Zune is a punchline now, but that whole year from this thing leased to the FCC to the launch in November, 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 even understand what gadget culture was like back then. There were no phones.

Like, phone ecosystems did not exist. Like, Engadget and Gizmodo were the first gadget logs. 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. And 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 8. Wow. Classic move. But I think I can sort of explain the reviews in 2 and Gadget Stories. And, Eli, I'm curious if either of these jogging memories for you. On November 13th, 2006, Ryan Black posts a very long blog.

titled, Installing the Zune, dot, dot, dot, sucked. This is before the review, and it's just a long, basically running diary of trying to set up the Zune software. And I think this is the story of the Zune, right? For all the ideas it had, for all the things it had, 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.

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. Maybe 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 state culture. But that just wasn't the case. It's a Microsoft product through and through. Yep. Brutal. Brutal. But also pretty telling. I do love that Ryan still wrote in the Royal Wii.

That was a real thing. We changed that later. So let me just remind you of some things people did not like about the Zune. You in particular, Neil, that 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 onto this thing and then were 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 was 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. People were so bummed. It didn't have podcasts. In terms of video, it only supported MWD. 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. It's like Apple patent number 607. Right. Let me just read you one more quote from a review. This 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 tried to do so much and didn't actually do very much at all. It's 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. Very good. Here's this really interesting thing, 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, 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. Half of everything is like the Microsoft story in so, so many ways. They didn't listen to Ron Swanson when he said whole ass 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 tried to pretend its competition was like Sandisk. You know, like, whatever, guys. Yeah. So I'm just going to blow through the history. The Zune HD was like peak Zune, but I just have a bunch of fun notes about what happened and how Microsoft tried to really make the Zune happen because it hit like 10% 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 at 10% market share. Oh no, this thing sucks. Or you say, we're at 10% market share. Let's like pour fuel in the fire. See if we can really make this work. That's what Microsoft decides to do. So 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 go to Zune, you could use Wi-Fi at McDonald's. To squirt one song. To squirt your song. Oh no. This is also here, by the way, the Zune 80 came out and you have 500 revisions in. 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. Like, a surprising number of people have Zune t-shirts still. There's that one guy famous who got a Zune tattoo. We covered every ounce of his existence. We interviewed him. Years later, I think they went back to him and were like, are you good? That's great. Wait, you saw 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. Like Zune Tattoo Guy was a character on the pages. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. So it's all, it's kind of happening. And then another thing I had forgotten was, do you remember when all the Zunes failed? No. So December 31st, 2008, all the Zunes failed.

Because it was a leap year. And the Zune's internal clock was not prepared for a leap year. It Y2K'd. And so it eventually fixed itself 24 hours later. But they also had a software thing you could do to update it. But it did not understand the idea of a leap year. 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? Everybody decides to get out of it. GameStop, which had been selling Zoom, decides to get out. But yeah, what has happened by 2009? Smartphones. So at this point, the iPhone is out. Smartphones are 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. We 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% 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% of the market. So I feel like we're in the game. We're driving our innovation hard. And 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? Do you think he ever thinks about that? And this is the same interview where later he was like, $500 for smartphones. 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. You're going to have to keep up with the Zune with the iPod that you're rapidly cannibalizing with the iPhone. You have absolutely immediately destroyed. So 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. 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. But like, back then, you had like...

team microsoft like we yeah we started the verge 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 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. But they were all also integrating music, right? Like, I remember you playing 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.

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. So like you saw these devices just kind of like eke along longer in Japan, but eventually everyone just got a smartphone and it just happened. And I think even in that transition, it was clear that that was where it was going to end, right? 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 and a 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 and 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 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 that is a sentence that you just did 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. So all the product people blamed the marketing people for making insane ads about birds that didn't explain what the Zune was. Yeah. All the Zune tattoo guy was considering getting a tattoo of the flaming birds. I just want to give you an update. 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 like 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. Oh, what?

It made a comeback, and it was something special from 2017. Hey, Kevin found this for you in a junker shop, said you'd come back to the fold someday. What is it? 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 thing. 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're going to take one more break, and then we're going to come back, and we're going to do the first history questions. We'll be right back.

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All 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? Neil, you go first. Okay. It was almost nothing. But it's not the Zune itself. Okay.

the interface of the Zoom. 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 Zoom interface. And they got that idea right. They executed it totally wrong, and it was slow and impossible to use. But that was the best thing about the Zoom. 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. 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. It gave it a different feel. But there's other colors. No, there are other colors, but 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 a, 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.

I had probably not touched the Zune in 15 years, and I got this one and pulled it out, and my immediate instinct was like, oh, this is kind of nice. It's nice to hold. It kind of feels like it. Even iPods were never really that nice to hold. They were very sharp and angular, and they were beautiful pieces of machinery, but they weren't like...

Comfy. You all can feel wherever 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 the Zune? There's so many things. V, you gotta 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 I just always had a bazillion different hard drives and flash drives on me.

And again, I cared about my music library curation. So the fact that I couldn't actually do that. Not enough. Not to Nilay'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 Nilay'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. 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...

It's just a hard drive thing. That 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. All 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. 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. You've got to assume there was a meeting at Apple every six months about, 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 good, and they were too early, and 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. 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 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, yeah. We don't think Apple can do it. No. The Apple Zoom doesn't have a great ring to it. No, the Apple Zoom doesn't have a great ring to it, but like Eli said at that time, I just think they would have been like, we could do it, but we won't. Okay, new question. Do you think a brown iPod would have sold? You know what? Yes, because they would have chose the correct. No.

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, hey, there comes some brown. Like, 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. Like it was just a very different time to try to attract attention to 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 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. Interesting. 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 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 on P3, 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 sorting. Whatever they're doing. Yeah. 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.

Instead, 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, it's going to be more specific. I think I would just make the software— Good. Good. Yeah. Yeah, make the software good. Big idea from Vizan. Yeah, just don't suck. That's my idea. This was a time in software where Apple was really focused on making beautiful software, and everyone else was like, here's some stuff. Yep. And, like, Apple, in 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. And 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, 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. Yeah. 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 rough 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. I 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? FM radio. That's mine too. We're on the way we watch 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. And it actually is on everything now. Next question is the one I have thought about the most with the Zoom. 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 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. And some people just for whatever reason, people really love this thing still in 2025. So maybe, maybe, but.

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. What are you guys doing? 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, right? 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. But 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? You 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. And 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 Virgin History Hall of Fame? Yes. Yes. Wow. Yes. And I will say that 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 Zoom. And 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 they 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. Yeah. 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 running. I was going to say we're putting the brown one in the Hall of Fame specifically. Oh, absolutely the brown one. 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 saying, like, I really cared about proportional fonts and 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 for, 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 copy of CEOs. They're like, here's what we did. We trained all of our AI on your shit for free. And now we just make it and you get nothing. And 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 gotta go get the work. And I think Microsoft, they face-pointed 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. We'll figure that out. It's not just this room. It might just be this room. All right. That 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 you. 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. 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. And 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. Version 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.

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