I’ve been accused of vehement hatred towards Microsoft on many an occasion. Sometimes, such finger-pointing is justified. Sometimes, it is not. Today, we’re going to stroll right down the middle of the path, because a Zune has found its way into my possession. (Specifically, I’ve got the original shit-brown model of the Zune, which has been retroactively named the Zune 30, due to its internal 30GB hard drive.) Naturally, I keep the thing away from my iPod, as I don’t want the two devices to transform into robots and fight each other in a battle to the death that will surely result in the destruction of my stuff.

But I digress. The Zune is Microsoft’s attempt at making an “iPod killer.” Well, as anyone knows, it’s been a colossal failure in that regard. However, as a multimedia player, it’s really quite good. It’s got a great interface, offers some neat features that separate it from the crowd, and it utilizes the Windows Live ID service to link you up with just about every other online service Microsoft offers (such as Xbox Live). For example, when I first created a Zune Marketplace account, all I had to do was log in with the same credentials I used for Xbox Live. All of my account info was automatically migrated over, along with my friends list. (Of course, only one of them owns a Zune!) Anyway, the biggest feature of the Zune is what Microsoft calls “the Social” (not to be confused with the metal), which is the “community” aspect of the player. It lets you wirelessly share media with other users, and also displays your playlists for friends to see.

Fun stuff aside, the Zune suffers from some absolutely appalling problems, the first of which is a typical Microsoft ploy to part you with your money. I’m talking about the purchasing system on the Zune Marketplace; instead of paying real money to buy songs and such, you need to use Microsoft Points. This is both confusing and annoying: the former because a single song costs 79 Points, but that equals approximately $0.99; and the latter because you can’t just buy 79 Points if you want one song. You must buy them in blocks of 400 Points minimum, which means you’re spending more money in the long run. The Marketplace isn’t perfect, either; at least in my experience, I’ve had constant “unknown errors” when trying to get music. There’s no error code, and no explanation; things simply don’t work, and that’s unacceptable.

Then there’s the whole sharing problem. Sure, you can share media wirelessly between Zunes as promised, but the transfer is slow, and worse yet, transferred songs can only be played three times or expire after three days (whichever comes first). And just in case that wasn’t bad enough, there’s plenty of songs on the Zune Marketplace that can’t be shared at all! (Estimates range up to 40%, but unless Microsoft releases official data [ha!], we may never know the extent of this issue.) While the whole Social aspect is neat on the surface, Microsoft’s commitment to knowing everything you do with their products can be quite intrusive and frightening.

Oh, and speaking of wi-fi, the Zune 30 is also incompatible with WPA2 wireless network encryption, so I’m shit outta luck if I want to connect to my home network with it. However, that’s a minor gripe, as later models have no problem with that form of encryption. (It’s not as annoying as, say, the Nintendo DS, which still only supports WEP. Ugh.)

Last but not least, we’ve got what’s easily the device’s biggest flaw: it only works with Windows PCs. Now, before you shout that “Microsoft isn’t going to make software for its Linux and Macintosh competitors!”, let me point out that they’ve done just that many times, the most obvious example being their Office suite for the Mac. (Which, ironically, Microsoft developers have often stated is superior to the Windows versions.) Not creating Zune software for Linux I can understand, as there’s so many different distributions that making a consistent product would be difficult and expensive. But why no Mac version? Microsoft is obviously trying to pull people away from the iPod, but if there’s a lot of Mac users that don’t yet own a media player, why not make it easier for them to choose something other than Apple’s flagship device?

Not only is there no official Zune software for non-Windows platforms, you can’t even properly connect a Zune to a Mac or Linux system right now. This is because Microsoft created a transfer system utilizing the Media Transport Protocol. While libraries like libmtp have been developed to access this protocol on the Mac and Linux, the Zune uses an upgraded version of MTP nicknamed “MTP-Z,” which has a lot of challenge-response security encoded into it. Therein lies the problem; to date, no one’s been able to properly crack MTP-Z to enable full access to Zunes on Mac or Linux platforms. (I’ve been fiddling around with XNJB, Amarok, and Rhythmbox in the interim.)

It’s obvious that these problems all boil down to one big digital rights management (DRM) mess, which is something Microsoft is infamous for. Unlike Apple, Microsoft’s really bent over backwards for the record companies, and unfortunately it’s the customer that gets the raw deal. It’s a shame, because aside from this laundry list of problems, the Zune is a great device with a lot of potential.