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Big Changes For Zune?

Late last week Microsoft Zune users received notice that the entire online Zune system would be down for a full 48 hours starting today. That’s an eternity in the online world and coming just prior to the holiday shopping season, it hints at a major effort to re-tool what has been only a marginally successful product.

UPDATE: The Xbox Live site is down and a merger of the two sites is expected.  (Thanks to Hypebot reader Matt for the tip.) Zune’s email read:

Zune_logo
The Zune service will be down for scheduled maintenance on Monday, September 29,
2008 from 12:01am Pacific Time, for up to 48 hours. During the downtime, Zune
Social, the forums on Zune.net, and all of Zune Marketplace will be offline.

We apologize for any inconvenience this might cause you.

Please
check back soon. We look forward to sharing our picks, plays, and
recommendations with you in the Zune Social and in Zune Marketplace shortly!

Sincerely,

Your Friends at Zune

What do you think Microsoft has in store for Zune?

Bruce Houghton on 09/29/2008 in Uncategorized | Permalink | Comments (3)
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3 Comments

  2. I have said from DAY ONE – after the product was announced but before the first Zune’s hit store shelves – that Microsoft pissed away one of the biggest opportunities in NOT branding the device as an X-Player or X-Box extension. They would have had a built in consumer base of x-box players to market to – who were already part of the ecosystem and ready to buy, synch and play. Additionally, they could have beat Apple by developing app extensions that let you take the X-Box gaming experience with you in smaller versions of games or “sub-stories” of the same game.
    This observation has total credibility to as the X-Box team was the same team behind the Zune. Why did they not see the obvious!?!