Rude New Year For Zune 30 Users

Owners of 30GB versions of Microsoft's Zune music player got a rude welcome into the New Year, with thousands of Zune 30's simultaneously shutting down as the clock struck 12 into December 31, 2008 – a day early. Zune 30's simply stopped working due to a bug in the device's internal clock that handled leap-year type time adjustments. While many Zune 30 users have regained functionality in their music players, many others haven't, and this could be a problem that's going to last for a few more days into 2009.

Now being called the “Zune Bug” (actually, the Zune Y2K9 Bug), a simple off-by-one error in Zune 30's was responsible for freezing thousands of the 30GB music players around the world. Several fixes were posted on the 'Net over the next few hours after the incident, and the effects have so far been mixed. It would normally have been a small problem if it happened during another time of the year, but think of all the New Year parties that depended on Zune 30's for its music...

I'm expecting all Zune 30 users to have their music players back up and running soon, but it still leaves a bad taste in the mouths of already-disgruntled Microsoft users around the world. With Microsoft having big plans for 2009 with Windows 7, cloud computing, and pay-as-you-go schemes for their software products, an oversight that should have been taken cared of nine years ago (amidst fears of the Y2K meltdown) still managed to slip through.

What's worse, one of Microsoft's first solutions was to drain the Zune 30's battery, then don't full-recharge it until after noon GMT (8pm Hong Kong Standard Time) of January 1st, 2009. Yup, I do think it was a pretty dumbed-down solution. Let your Zune's battery die, then don't use it for two days. No patches, no updates, no quick-download fixes. Some disgruntled users griped that Microsoft was probably coming up with a fix that would require Zune 30 to upgrade to its latest OS version before they could hope to use their music players again. I know it sounds overly cynical, but Microsoft has been known to do that kind of “blackmailing” in the past.

On a side note, users of Zune's newer 80GB and 120GB versions did not encounter such problems with their devices. Still, the users of the older 30GB version are basically the ones who stood by Microsoft when they came out with something to match up to Apple's widely successful line of iPods. Zune currently doesn't hold a candle to the iPod's popularity, and this little glitch just might hurt Microsoft's tiny market share in the music player industry.

Of course, I may be overreacting, but Microsoft does seem to have a lot of problems with regards to the little things. And if you ask me (and Don Norman, advocate of universal design, too, I believe), it's the little things that people remember. And believe me when I say that this little glitch will probably be remembered when tech writers wrap up the top 50 tech failures of 2009.

Oh, and to iPod users, a Happy New Year to you guys.