I just went and wasted the entire rest of the research budget for May. Really. I went to "Zune News Site" dot com. I was looking for information about the new Zune. There isn't even any news about the old Zune. The top item -- I swear this is true -- I'm not making this up. The top item on zunenewssite.com is from the Snohomish County edition of the Seattle Times: "A houseboat and trailer in the 21900 block of Oak Way were impounded after the city received no response to a May 5 parking-violation notice." If you scroll down the Snohomish County page you get to (really I swear this is a direct quote):
Thursday: Somebody stole a Zune MP3 player, $20 in cash, a jacket and assorted CDs from a vehicle parked in the 400 block of Holiday Street.
That news is the frigging Zune Headline on zunenewssite.com.
Just below that you can read a Seattle Times article where Bill Gates (visionary) says that media is moving to the web. Only a Seattle paper would devote any ink to Bill Gates predicting the recent past.
On every page I went to (three) of this site the top ad is a picture of a pink Zune for sale on Amazon. It has a butterfly on the display. 'Nuff said.
Real Stuff
Okay, here's some real news. Microsoft is killing the Portable Media Center, the earlier version of "iPod killer?" Remember that? Boy, I sure hope they still support it, because if they don't there are going to be fifteen or twenty really pissed off people. Two in northern Michigan alone.
Every time I hear "iPod killer," I picture a soldier, alone on a grassless beach, armed with wits and a pistol and charging a battery of machine gun nests. About a mile inland, shirtless native girls are serving umbrella'ed coconut shells full of rum to iPod and several of his friends. You can't win when your best option is suicide and the opponent doesn't even notice.
In other news, a Danish consumer protection board has found a design flaw in the iBook G4. That's on Mac Daily News, so it isn't technically research. I was going to read that anyway. It takes a year for the flaw to show up. I'll bet if Windows machines lasted that long they'd probably have similar problems.
I already had dinner, so technically I could ramble on for hours. I won't because, technically, I ran out of things to say long before I started typing. I just remembered that I don't have "Only the Lonely" by the Motels. Now I do. Weird. For some reason I thought that was The Pretenders.
I'm reading John Gruber now. Just geek stuff.
Oh well. I'm off to the Tera Post.
