This, I think, is a very fundamental part of how Silicon Valley works too — I absolutely believe I could run a successful tech business because so many people doing it are morons.

And that’s how they get you to play their games & look the other way for access to their money & power

Change in Headline

Zune was the most fun I’ve ever had at a job and while I didn’t do Product at Zune; it was a speed run of A LOT of crazy and hard product lessons.

I will forever love the Zune and owe my career to the Zune.

I personally think the worst thing about Zune was the DRM, it was just comically bad to try to work around. If it had been a competent file system based player and Microsoft invested in an *iTunes killer* instead of an *iPod killer* we would have made it a lot farther.

My personal best thing about the Zune was the desktop software, followed by the gratuitous use of pink.

One of the PMs I worked with blamed the use of pink for not being able to get the funding we needed from BillG, who famously does not like pink.

Microsoft officially ended Zune in 2015, a fun tidbit is I was the last person on call for Zune. I wasn’t special enough to get one of the Zune’s engraved with a tombstone, but I still got paged once a year until 2015 to renew the certificate so the Zune DRM server continued to work.

The playbook was “well how would a label do it??”

We had Common come to the office. But it wasn’t like we had PR or could do streaming anything or ANYONE would have ever known

I joined Zune in 2008 and the convo I don’t think is heading into the Zune 2.0 launch & the launch of the Social which was my era — but the salt about the music industry not doing enough drove ALL
the marketing decisions in 2008 & 2009

I think I forked my own thread, but I love the “years long blame game” convo on this

Fam it was all of us. We all tried but we didn’t land it 😂