Zune Thoughts - Daily News, Views, Rants and Raves

"A lot of the points make me say "yeah, but wait a bit." It's not that we don't get Podcasting (Robert knows I'm among the loudest voices about Podcasting at Microsoft), it's that podcasting wasn't done in time. I don't expect anyone to buy based on my promises, but it's important to separate things we don't have at launch from comments about Zune's long term prospects."

Remember that Robert Scoble interview with Matt Jubelirer recently? David Caulton sure does, and he put together a few responses last week to the issues that Robert later raised in a separate post. Most of it is pretty standard rebuttal/agreement stuff: the Zune team is focused on mainstream use scenarios like music, not podcasting, there's nothing special about white headphones any more, and the round dpad is different from what iPod users are used to but ultimately very easy to adapt to and not a hurdle like some thing it is.

What really caught my attention though was in reading the comments: there's the usual flaming that goes on (pity, that) but David's response was worth noting:

"Man, how long do you guys think we've been doing this? I was in the room in January when we started whiteboarding. Yes, THIS January. We'll ship podcasting, and we'll call it "Podcasting" when we do."

This confirms what I've thought all along (and maybe this is common knowledge, but it's news to me): the Zune team is extremely new, this first generation Zune is light on features, and looking a whole lot like the Gigabeat S, because they didn't have time to do anything else. That might not be a great way to launch a foray into a brand new market, but it's better to try, fail, and learn what to do next time when to never launch at all. It gives me hope that wireless Zune to PC sync is missing because they didn't have time to implement it rather than not thinking of it all to begin with.

"When the guys from Zune started granting interviews we wanted to do one Zune MAX style. We decided to interview each of the Microsoft Zune employees with a blog in one huge interview but that may be too much. We figure there must be more then these three great people working on the Zune but these are the ones with Zune blogs and they were the only people that would answer our questions anyway. We could probably make this the longest blog post ever but you really want to get to these interviews. Theres some juicy tidbits of Zune information in here for those of us starved for some Zune news. Without further delays ZuneMAX.com brings you the first installment of the Zune Crew Interview series."

zuneMAX has an interview up with David Caulton that has a bit of history about David's time at Microsoft and his role on the Zune team. One interesting technical note from the interview: the Zune desktop software will apparently have the ability to manually set the cache size for transcoding videos. That's an important feature to have, because Windows Media Player 10 lacks it and I recently discovered 5 GB worth of temporary video files from completed transcodes.