The release of the Zune Player has been, despite the concerted PR effort, as exciting as a new flavour of Heinz beans. Unlike the chaos and excitement of the launching of the Wee Wii and the Playstation 3, the Zune was met with a chorus of negative reviews.

My favorite is Andy Ihnatko of Sun Time whose experience with the Zune player was as “enjoyable as having an airbag deployed in your face”.

The setup process stands among the very worst experiences I’ve ever had with digital music players. The installer app failed, and an hour into the ordeal, I found myself asking my office goldfish, “Has it really come to this? Am I really about to manually create and install a .dll file?”

Avoid the loony Zune – Sun Times

Stan Beer from ITWire was equally vocal about the installation of the Zune software:

The first time I tried to download the Zune software, it wouldn’t let me even though my system met the Zune software standards – Win XP SP2, a processor that runs at least at 1.5GHz, memory of at least….hang on what is this nonsense anyway!? I got none of this minimum hardware requirements rubbish when I installed iTunes 7, which installed without hitch in exactly five minutes.

Why consumers are angry with Microsoft over Zune

Stan makes two good points, firstly what is it with the hardware requirements for a simple piece of software such as the Zune Application and secondly the Zune software has not been immune to vaguaries of Windows software installation. It has been said on numerous occassions that the key to the Itunes success has been the seamless experience for users regardless of their level of skill.

[Zune Amazon Watch - # 74; Number of Music Players above Zune: Apple (12) including 1st, 2nd and 3rd place, SanDisk (4), Creative Zen (1)]

No Points for Points

The new points program for Zune is giving most reviewers heartache.

The iPod and now Zune have greatly transformed the way people buy music. People no longer visit a brick-&-mortar store to check out CDs of their choice and then make a purchase. A significant percentage of music sales nowadays happens online. Apple’s online music library iTunes has made it a lot simpler, allowing visitors to download songs of their choice for 99c a song or for a subscription fee as with Rhapsody.com which charges a monthly fee of $9.99 for unlimited access to music.

On the other hand, Zune’s equivalent of iTunes, the Zune Marketplace (uses a currency of points), compels the user to shell out at least $5 which will buy a bulk of 400 points (@ 99 cents for ever 79 points). When your total purchase reaches $80 worth, you get one extra song free. The Zune Marketplace offers a choice of about 2 million tracks but no videos or podcasts.

This system would work except for the fact that Apple already successfully uses credit cards and a system known as dollars and cents. Because Apple has kept it simple, it has created a competitive disadvantage for Microsoft’s system. They may be subsidizing the player through keeping the interest on the float, or some other motive. While people are busy theorizing this motive, they are not buying music from Zune marketplace which makes for a very long uphill battle.

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