An article in Wired predicts the failure of Microsofts' forthcoming Zune Media player.
While they probably are right, the Zune won't be succesfull, it will be for all the wrong reasons ...
The dominance of the Ipod wont be broken, and why? because no single player can compete with the complete control Apple had over the whole line: content - distribution - store - player.
and ... worst of all: complete control AFTER the sale.
a quote from the article: "New features, no matter what's promised, will likely not convince people to abandon their little white boxes -- especially since none of the billions of purchased iTunes songs will play on whatever Microsoft releases."

As a matter of fact: no Itunes song will play on any other mobile player then an Ipod.
I can't wrap my mind around the fact that this doesn't seem to bother anyone.
Apple wants it both ways: They sell you the song. But do they? no, you can only use it with their hardware ... That's not selling, that's giving it in license ... as long as you want to listen to your songs on the go, you'll have to have an Ipod. The lifespan of an Ipod is something around 4 years, so if you want to keep listening to your songs and be mobile, you will have to keep buying new Ipods once a while ...

this is bad ... very bad.

And people are shouting that Microsoft is evil ...

I completely don't get this. This is one of the reasons I really really really dislike Apple. Even in such a way I will never ever buy an Apple product in my life ...
(And for people wondering, I can easily give heaps of other examples why Apple is yuk.)


Smal updaten in 15/09/2006:
Hmm: Zune appears to have some drooling features ...
look at this and this...
VERY slick !!!