Zune sums up everything I hate about Microsoft

With yesterdays launch of the Zune HD’s and the new Zune Software (4.0), it didn’t take me long to realise everything I hate about Microsoft can be summed up by using Zune examples.

1. Stupid region restrictions

Neither Zune HD or regular Zunes are for sale outside North America. Likewise, the Zune Pass isn’t available outside of NA. I know plenty of people who would drop their iPod for a Zune and the Zune pass, the music subscription model is an awesome idea, and the Zune HD is some awesome looking hardware.

I know the above is the factually correct representation of the world, but I really wish us dragons could give them money on a monthly basis so we could listen to various monster rock songs.

2. Bloatware

iTunes, 89meg; Songbird, 13.3meg, WinAmp, 9.8meg… Zune Player? 131meg – and it comes in x86 and x64 separate downloads. In typical fashion, Microsoft just have to have the largest program available. Why is it so big when most of it is visualisations and data pulled from the web? That brings me to my next gripe..

3. Custom UI framework – not WPF

Why is the Zune Player 131meg? Probably because they’ve implemented their own private UI framework based on Media Center rather than using Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF), the framework we are constantly reminded of being "good" for media and the like.

WPF is supposed to be the successor to WinForms in .NET. It can use vectors for the interface, has hardware accelerated support, pixel shader support for effects… but where has Microsoft used it? Well, there is Expression Studio (a suite of applications for… making WPF/Silverlight apps) and the unreleased Visual Studio 2010 (…a program for developing WPF/Silverlight apps amongst other things)… I can’t think of any other examples.

The apparent lack of faith in their own framework leaves us WPF developers scratching our heads and wondering if we should be calling it quits on WPF, or striving on when they finally iron out a considerable number of the show stopper bugs (virtualisation problems, resize performance problems, text blurry problems) in .NET 4.0 (or possibly later!)

4. Overlapping Products

Instead of being content with just one media/music playing application, Microsoft have decided to reinvent the wheel and have two separate programs. Zune Player and Windows Media Player (WMP). It’s be great if the features in Zune Player were a super-set of those found in Windows Media Player 12, but it lacks a host of features found in the latest (and even some found in the previous) version of WMP.

The above shows that unless you really want the pretties or the few features WMP is lacking, there isn’t much in the way to convince me to use the Zune player.