Zune owners are a notoriously thin-skinned lot. It might have something to do with the Zune’s perpetual status as a third place also ran in the portable media player market. Or maybe it’s the fact that the Zune apparently borrows so much of it’s “innovation” from the world’s worst portable media player.
Whatever the reason for their prickly nature, Zune owners have a whole new reason to grumble. Early this morning every 30 GB Zune on the planet stopped working. You have to give Microsoft credit, this was an act of synchronized ritual suicide that has not been seen before in the consumer electronics business.
How does something like this happen with a mainstream product? Some have speculated that this could be a date problem related to the new year. In fact, many are already referring to this as the Z2K9 bug. But, if that’s the case then there’s a bug in Microsoft’s bug. You would expect a problem of this sort would manifest itself at midnight on New Years Eve, not the night before.
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