Apparently this was ‘always the plan’, with an update to be made available to enable Vista compatibility. Why it can’t be made available now, in calendar year 2006, is still unclear. Surely it must already work? Why the wait – there are plenty of people who can legally get access to Vista, with the millions all subscribing to Microsoft ‘MSDN’ program able to download Vista today. There are also still millions of copies of RC1 and RC2 out there.

Of course, not everyone will be as brave/foolhardy as I am to run Vista exclusively, with no access (at home, anyway) to an XP machine. Were I a US customer who’d bought a Zune, I’d be mightily peeved at the requirement to keep creaky ol’ Windows XP around somewhere on life support, just so I could transfer music to my mp3 player.

It’s also fascinating to read all of the news that music companies are finally deciding that it might just be a good idea to sell music in mp3 without any DRM. Part of the reason for doing this is to try and stop piracy, but it’s also a way to legally sell music that will play on the iPod, as the iPod plays mp3s without restriction, just like the Zune.

Don’t want to use iTunes with your iPod, but want to be legal? Buy non-DRM’d mp3s. Don’t want to use the Zune music store? It’s the same story.

Of course, legal mp3 stores with massive libraries of the mainstream music you want to buy don’t exist, unless you count the Russian based ‘allofmp3.com’.

But as that company is being slowly hounded out of business, while it actually is the type of store I just said didn’t exist, it doesn’t count anywhere near as much as it did before when the music industry wasn’t out to get them as they are today.

With the iPod having sold tens of millions of players, many of which are reported to have non-DRM’d mp3s on them anyway, which can be shared illegally at will, why not make the purchase of non-DRM’d mp3s legal? Finally it is happening.

As are a few sales for Microsoft, especially as we lead up to Christmas. There’ll be plenty of purchase activity over the next three weeks, and Microsoft is hoping that they’ll have shifted 1m Zunes by the end of the ‘fiscal year’ in 2007. Sadly that’s not Dec 31 2006, but sometime in 2007.

1m Zunes by the end of the Christmas shopping season would have been a bolder move and a better target. Perhaps it’s the internal target they have anyway.

There’s also mounting speculation that when Steve Jobs said 2007 was going to be a big year, that he really meant it. Ok, so, the speculation isn’t really about that. But it is about three new models of iPod supposedly on the way, including a 16Gb Video iPod, an iPod with a 100Gb hard drive and a widescreen, and the iPod phone itself.

Well, we’d love to see them all, and we’d love to see an updated Zune. Microsoft should try to release it sooner rather than later, especially if Apple’s new iPods really are as good as they sound…

Zunes, iPods and mp3s… anyone who has woken up from a coma lasting for at least a decade, and who is only familiar with the Sony Walkman, must truly be wondering if they have woken up inside of an episode of ‘The Twilight Zune’.
{moscomment}

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