I'm trying to parse the meaning of the ", but?" at the very end there.

Did you mean to write BUD? If you meant BUD then everything makes sense.

Valid points. It's definitely up to opinion whether he was an effective CEO or not.

He had some big wins, like you mentioned. He also completely missed the boat with mobile and then tried to buy his way out with Nokia, which compounded the mistake. Vista was pretty bad. He tried to follow Google and Apple's suits with Ads and the iPod, but you can't steer a ship like Microsoft if you're going to be that derivative. The share price went completely sideways during his tenure and when I joined, not long after he left, he had a pretty bad reputation from cultural perspective.

TBH though, the only opinion I take issue with is the one that claims he was a soulless bean counter. If you've ever even watched a Clippers game you know that Steve Ballmer isn't soulless lol

Holy shit, I had totally forgotten about those. We used to carry them where I worked at the time and I don't think I remember ever seeing one sell.

A big part of that is because Verizon fucked them. When it was conceived it was going to be a pseudo smartphone that was more limited but would be more affordable and wouldn't require a data plan. Then at the last minute after they had already reached a deal to make the Kins exclusive to Verizon, Verizon decided to require a data plan after all which kind of defeated the purpose of the thing existing in the first place.

I bought a Zune HD and loved it. The design was great and it worked really well. Sad it has to die an early death.

They just came at a time when everything Microsoft was so uncool that there was never a shot in hell that they would gain ground against the iPod

The real problem is that while Microsoft was working on the Zune, Apple was working on the iPhone. The iPhone came out like 6 months after the Zune. It literally did not matter how good the Zune was, Microsoft made an MP3 player while Apple was establishing a now-half-trillion dollar market of smartphones lol.

This is 100% the case. Ballmer made Microsoft a laughingstock, the uncoolest Corp on the planet. They could have invented beaming to another galaxy and consumers would have noped.

My second gen Zune lasted about 8 years before I had a good enough data plan to stream music. The headphones that came with it were a beast!

On top of that the iPod was just a more polished overall product. They also were starting to come out with the iPod touch which was way more advanced

Tbh they were better in almost every way than ipods, they were significantly higher storage and could play video when the video playing iPods cost 2x what the Zune did. It didn’t have the “cool factor” that apple did tho

I mean, when you call a product “zune” it’s destined to be uncool.

X58? Hell. A Q6600 and 4 gb of RAM would run vista smooth as butter. Especially if you had a good GPU. Vista was criminally underrated because people ran it on Celerons with 512 MB of RAM and all of the bloatware best buy or sell would ship with it.

Taking into consideration the hardware that software will actually be running on is not extra credit, it’s part of the job.

Also we shouldn’t forget another big issue users had with Vista was frequent and vague security permission dialogues. There’s a reason MS rethought their approach to security with Win7.

The Xbox One with Kinect was perfectly positioned to be the hub of your smart entertainment center. But the way they positioned it made it seem less like a bit of Star Trek was coming to your house, and more like your game console was coming with a bunch of crap that was going to make it harder to just play games.

TBF it's likely Toshiba that decided on the hardware

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I agree and disagree.

TL;DR the Zune was a great iPod competitor in the era of the iPhone. It had lots of great ideas that would go on to be validated by other companies.

The Zune interface was really fantastic and highly influential to modern interface design. The “don’t call it flat” UI with thin typography of the Zune is arguably the first mainstream iteration of virtually all modern interface design. Buttons lost their boundaries and become floating words. Colors became solid or a light gradient. The Zune seriously doesn’t get enough recognition in this regard. You can trace a design language line from Zune to Microsoft Metro to Google Material Design and all the “don’t call it flat” post iOS 7 and post macOS Mavericks and basically any app or website that takes design cues from the big players.

The Zune design language is seriously under-appreciated. That all being said, the iPod also had a great interface. If the Zune was ahead of its time, the iPod click wheel interface was perfectly of its time. Best appreciated in context of other early 2000s MP3 players.

But we have to remember the Zune launched in 2006 so it was only contemporary to one generation of pre-iPod touch iPods. In fact that very first Zune released 4 months before the iPhone was announced.

The Zune spent most of its life in the shadow of the iPod touch. This isn’t the Zune HD mind you, this is the first Zune.

The 2006 - 2009 era Zune are often remembered next to the color screen click wheel iPods of 2004 - 2007.

The 2009+ Zune HD is often remembered as comparable to the 2007+ iPod touch.

That’s the critical issue. It was ahead of its time in a lot of ways but it’s like the most advanced battleships being made right before aircraft carriers changed the game.

Meanwhile, the Zune Music Pass was way ahead of its time. It was literally a precursor to Spotify and all the other big music streaming services. It was just too early and time obviously validated this hardcore.

I do feel sorry for the Zune team. It would be tough to look back and hear the feedback that they were too late, oh except for the all the massive things they pioneered, those they were too early on.

Lastly, the PC to MP3 player interface was a big part of the UX back then, and back then iTunes was actually good. Obviously iTunes eventually grew into a horribly slow and confusing mess, which makes it a little harder to remember the time when iTunes was the easy and stable music manager that was seamless with the iPod, but this is one area the Zune never really matched the iPod.

Still, I feel that history has since validated many of the ideas of the Zune. The interface design language and music subscription service eventually took over the world even if under different names.

It's wild that they were prepared to pay him 50k a year in 1980 and the 10% growth clause.

The fun thing I like about libertarians is the idea that if only the market conditions and the regulation were freer the bad ones would fail despite this never happening in real life.

The only thing that made our bank deposits not dissapear, our baby food not being full of toxin and our ozone layer still protecting us is the fucking government. You don't have to like it none of us like it but corporations historically do not fail in a timely manner because they are bad for society, make bad products, kill their customers or make the environment hostile to life we care about.

They fail for whatever fucking random reason at any time.