Zune Thoughts: What Some People Don't Realize: The Zune Won't WiFi Share Out of The Box

When I was at the Microsoft Partner Pavilion at CES, there was a station set up with various music and video playback devices. They had several Zunes there, and a few people picked them up to try and share files back and forth. They commented that they couldn't understand why it wouldn't work, and everyone, including the Microsoft employee staffing the station was baffled. I picked up several of the Zunes and checked the Settings > About > Zune information. Sure enough, these were Zunes right out of the box with the 1.0 firmware on them. What that meant is that they were unable to share wirelessly. It would seem that the Zune was released so quickly, they didn't have the device software finished before it had to go off to Toshiba for manufacturing.

They made the doubtless hard call to ship a device that couldn't do what the marketing materials said it could do out of the box until it received a firmware upgrade. Was this a bad call? It allowed them to have the Zune in the retail channel for Christmas, and that seems to have been the single most important goal for the Zune team. But people doing demos of the devices, especially Microsoft staff members at CES, need to know that every Zune should be connected to a computer to get the latest firmware update before it will actually function like it's supposed to. Given the litigious nature of the world today, I'm surprised no one launched a lawsuit against Microsoft for deceptive marketing...