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Remember the Zune? Probably not, or if you do, you don’t remember it well. It was a portable digital music player launched by Microsoft in 2006 to compete with Apple’s iPod. It tied to Microsoft’s MSN music service in the same way the iPod ties to iTunes.
The Zune was one of Microsoft’s many ungodly kludges. It started life as a bulky, too-expensive, unwieldy contraption that was unpleasant to use and inferior in every way to an iPod. I know because I had one. (That’s the kind of thing one has to do when one covers the Microsoft beat.) And it only got worse from there. For example, there was midnight on December 31, 2008, when countless first-generation Zunes froze and refused to work because their internal clock drivers couldn’t handle the leap year properly. (A day later, the Zune unfroze by itself.) Eventually, in 2011, Microsoft finally discontinued the unloved and unlovable device.