Wow, that really is a massive oversight. Microsoft are just digging their grave deeper and deeper.

Very valid point, both for Google and Microsoft. I simply could not believe that MS could really fumble things up as much as they did with Zune - you’d think that compatibility with Vista was so dead obvious that it was taken for granted - by everyone, it seems, from Microsoft itself.

I suppose MS can breathe a little bit easier, though, knowing that their arch-rival in Web 2.0 products is in the same situation. On a side note, I also agree with the initiative to cut down on the amount of Beta’s Google has running at the moment - heck, even Gmail is still nominally in beta testing! I’d imagine that unless a user actually sits down and does some serious research on Google’s various offerings, a lot of its products would remain under the radar for the majority of potential customers - and those brave enough to figure out that there’s more to Google than search engines and e-mail will quite likely be dazzled by the vast array of features they do offer, half of which is in Beta.

Look’s like Microsoft is asking some other company to take their place.
With all that cash they should improve communication to state of art level. too bad they don’t care.

Replying to 4:

Well, Einer, seeing as how Microsoft managed to ignore Web 2.0 so successfully until now, it would appear that asking some other company to take their place is almost Microsoft’s new strategy!

Honestly, though, I agree with you - they sometimes seem to have a knack for missing the most obvious things.

Google is starting to do the integration. Excel attachments in GMail have a “Open in Google Spreadsheets” link - no doubt Word attachments will follow soon.

As much as I enjoy making fun of Microsoft, they only part of the whole Zune on Vista thing they screwed up was not coming out with a strong statement that the Zune will not be supported on Vista until Vista is in production, possibly even tieing it to the consumer version.

As it stands, it comes off as MSFT not paying attention. If they had simply made the above statement — which, btw, is a perfectly reasonable statement to make — they could have staved off a lot of bad PR with one single very easy move.

Of course, the whole Zune launch seems to be rife with really dumb mistakes.

meh, it makes microsoft look bad, but the new operating system is going to take time to really roll out - it’s not like tomorrow everybody’s going to migrate to vista. hell, some people are still on windows 98….

That is the single most amazing mistake by a manufacturer for a product launch EVER (or that I could recall). Not compatible with the latest OS they create, is this a joke!?

Microsoft has other stuff going on http://www.msfirefox.com

Google products not speaking directly to each other is not the same magnitude as an important product like Zune being incompatible with a core product like Vista.

Zune site says..,

Windows Vista is not supported at this time. Check back soon for updates.

Vista isn’t even out. To anyone. Much less consumers, who won’t see it until 2007. Why’s this news?

Seeing as how I can’t buy Vista, but I can a Zune, the incompatibility issue doesn’t exist.

Consumers will see Vista at the end of November 2006, not 2007. You can purchase consumer licenses early from CompUSA.

Should the Zune not work with Vista when it ships wide-release, then the incompatibility issue both exists AND will be a major problem.

This seems minor considering Apple’s iTunes software breaks the functionality of iPods with practically every other release. The times it doesn’t destroy its own hardware, it resurrects the dead ones. My friend was ecstatic his first generation iPod starting working again with the 7.0.1 fix. An odd thing to be happy about when it never should have stopped working to begin with.

Such is life as a Mac consumer. Only time will tell with this product from Microsoft.

i bet there will be more zune units sold than machines upgraded to vista in the next six months …. could be a problem for some, sure, but the fact that device’s firmware can be upgraded to make it compatible w. vista makes the purchasing decision easy: buy a zune, upgrade to vista when the dust settles, then upgrade your zune to be compatible with your new vista os.

no more ipods. please.

I have to second that, why does everyone make such a big deal of the Zune not being supported by Vista at this point? There are only two groups of people who have access to Vista right now:

1) Customers who have PCs covered by Microsoft Software Assurance or a Microsoft Enterprise Agreement can download Vista Enterprise from the Licensing website right now.
2) Everybody else who got the leaked RTM from some file sharing network.

Frankly, Microsoft probably does not give a sh*t that some twelve year old cannot use the Zune on his pirated copy of Vista yet. The consumer launch is still months away, and by then both Zune and Vista will have been updated to work perfectly together.

Could this have been prevented by implementing Vista support earlier? Sure! But it is as big a deal as every blogger in the world tries to make it? Hell no!

I just started last week as a Director within the Zune group and wanted to comment on the Vista question. As a couple of people on this thread have already stated, Zune is a consumer product and as such we have timed our support around the consumer availability of Vista which is the end of January 2007. You’re right that we should have been more proactive in clarifying this.

Google could take a huge step forward with the fairly simple move of making allowing their calendar to sync OTA with Blackberry and other PDA devices.

Excellent points on the lack of integration at Google. I have noticed this for some time and was extremely happy when Sergey Brin made public their intention to face this dilemma.

The same criticism that plagues Zune right now is the same that happened to the XBOX. It will be incrementally bettered and will get some market share over time.

MS knows what it is doing.

The funny thing is, I’m sure MS is less than a year away from deploying a branded MS Office for the web. And, they’ll have the Office brand to start with.

Google ‘Docs and Speadsheets’. Please.

Haha — I don’t know about MSFT, but the part about Google is completely off the mark. I’m one of the Tech Leads on AdWords reporting — to really understand why we’re not integrated with Google Spreadsheets yet, see my blog post:

http://jonathanbetz.blogspot.c.....nosed.html

Is disconnect really the word? Or is it “Zuny Tunes”?

Fine print written by nitwits undermines Microsoft’s wannabe iPod-killer. The name is just one small part of the problem. The words iPod and iTunes are variations of recognizable words that point to real things. What’s a Zune? What does it point to? Nothing. Plus, it rhymes with all kinds of things Microsoft probably doesn’t want to rhyme with, including their competitor’s dominant and highly successful music marketplace. Not smart. Downright Zuny (sorry). And that’s without mentioning screwy MS “points” ordering system or shared songs that evaporate after 3 days or not being able to use Zune as a hard drive. Huh?

http://letterfromhere.blogspot.....en-by.html

By a show of hands, how many people were waiting for Vista before getting a Zune? Yeah, that’s what I thought. Steve, your ignorance of software development is showing. It’s not. This is not news, and in fact fairly common within MS. Has MS said it won’t EVER support Zune running on Vista? Is Vista available today like Zune is? Who’s to say support for Zune on Vista won’t be there when Vista is widely available. Seriously, this is NOT a story.

I am not able to understand this point on Zune compatibility on Vista. By the time Zune software was made, vista would have been on Betas and it is still due to come in to hands of consumer.

Are we expecting too much from Beta products? How many Vista installations are there in this end user world as of now? And why on this earth, Zune or some other software should be releasing software which is not well tested on the final release of Vista?

I don’t understand how Google’s “20% time” is leading to failures in internal communications. Care to elaborate?

As mentioned earlier, GMail has the “Open in Google Spreadsheets” link for .xls attachments. Oddly enough, there’s also a feature for Word attachments, but done completely different. Google Docs gives you a unique address you can forward your attachments to (Click Upload…), and it automatically gets sucked into your Google Docs repository. But it only works for docs, not spreadsheets. Maybe it’s another one of those miscommunications, or maybe they’re seeing which one works better. Personally, I don’t give a hoot.

There’s an obvious answer to this problem. These companies need to set up internal social networks. Imagine how effective internal communication would be and how much the company culture would be reinforced.

Or maybe not:

- You’re not allowed to join the “Pre-IPO Stock Options” group.
- The cute new girl in marketing who just got hired last week has 550 friends, including all of the executive management team members, while you, the 28 year-old bald guy with glasses that does releases at 3 am, has 2, and one of those is GoogleBot, the Tom of GSpace.
- Bill Gates, who is the Tom of MicroSpace, posts drunken party pictures from a weekend kegger with Warren Buffet and sends a message to everybody saying “Sayonara b*tches!”
- GFeeds indicate that Melissa Mayer and Larry Page are in a relationship but Melissa keeps poking you and sending messages asking if you’d like to get together for one of her “quickie” meetings regarding a new product called GSpot.
- Steve Ballmer invites you to the “F*CK GOOGLE!” group everyday at 3 am.
- The janitor that joined the company in 1989 continually posts pictures of his Lamborghini and 19 year old Swedish model wife while you write code for 16 hours a day and only make enough to afford an Audi and a mail order bride.
- Sergey Brin leaves comments on the profile page of your boss thanking him for the great job he’s doing and inviting him for a trip on the Google Party Plane even though he’s an incompetent fool and you’re always saving him, including that time he almost publicly released 500,000 search records and confidential internal data about those pesky “invalid clicks.”
- Ray Ozzie bans you from the “Vista Bugs” message board for “excessive posts.”
- Larry Ellison infiltrates GSpace and sends a spam to everybody reminding them that Google is a one-trick pony and Eric Schmidt responds by calling him a “terrible, terrible crazy idiot nurderer.”

“Singing the Zune tune” will become a euphemism lack of planning and foresight.

Zune is today’s Edsel.

Sounds like Microsoft needs a team of consultants to come in and do a little restructuring!

Too bad you neglect to mention that Google has started integrated products very nicely. You mention that you can’t open a .doc file from Gmail in Google Docs, but what you didn’t mention is that recently they added the ability to open an .xls file in Google Docs. Oh, that’s right, you only say that Google Docs is formally Writely. You are wrong. Google had Writely and Google Spreadsheets, but combined the two into Google Docs. See? Integration. It is only natural that viewing a .doc in Google Docs, just like you are currently able to view a .xls in Google Docs is on the way. So how about you cut the crap and report the whole story and not just the things that actually fit with your damn article?

I knew I smelled something rotten when I read the words “fumbling to communicate” and “obvious lack of conversations internally”. And sure enough, Jonathan Betz put the lie to that idea in his blog entry about the relationship between the Google AsWords and Spreadsheet teams.

You know, Michael, I must admit that I am constantly awestruck by the size and shape of the things that you regularly pull out of your backside. Veritably, yours is an Ass 2.0.

Your point on Google focused on technical integration, but I think the real business potential will appear when Google gets their marketing act together and actually convinces, helps and motivates users to use the multitude of features they offer. It’s still too techie-focused.

Personally, I think that’s a bigger potential than the YouTube acquisition:
http://kbhayes.com/blog/2006/1.....be-rumors/

Do you seriously think that it won’t work with Vista? Is TechCrunch so anti-MSFT that you wouldn’t give the benefit of the doubt?

It works. Trust me - I have one, I have Vista, it works GREAT.

By the time you can actually buy and install Vista the support will be there.

Don’t believe the hype.

Mark: What do you mean it works “GREAT”?! Stop bullshitting. There is enough proof of Vista being a crappy OS.

Take a look at this eWeek article for example:

http://www.eweek.com/article2/.....318,00.asp