Yesterday I got in my car to go to work and plugged in my Zune to find it frozen. Not frozen as in cold, even though it could have been but the software was frozen. I chalked this up to the thing possibly being broken and figured I’d take a look at it later when I had more time. I vaguely remember hearing about someone else’s Zune also having problems somewhere in that day. This morning I get up and I check out the videos on the front page of Google and find one that’s referring to all 30GB Zunes, the model I have, crashing. I watch that and then search the news for Zune and sure enough, every 30GB Zune out there has crashed because Microsoft didn’t program the software to be able to handle leap years.

Awesome, eh? I guess the idea was the none of these Zunes, as this is a two year old version, were going to last long enough to make it to a leap year anyway. Apparently, they didn’t foresee bad sales that left retailers with stock of this model even after the next year’s model came out. That’s right, many of us are using a two year old model that was only purchased one year ago. You can see how Microsoft tries to spin this into a good thing:

Early this morning we were alerted by our customers that there was a widespread issue affecting our 2006 model Zune 30-GB devices (a large number of which are still actively being used)

http://www.informationweek.com/news/personal_tech/music/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=212700344&cid=iwhome_art_Digit_mostpop

You see that? This is a good thing because it shows how many people are still using a model that they’ve owned for two years! These things hold up great, don’t they?

When it comes down to it, this is simply a matter of incompetence. I was planning on my next MP3 player also being a Zune, maybe one that I could fit my whole library on, but if they could screw up something as simple as this, which comes after having horrible issues with their music management software, I’m not too sure I want to go that route. You want to know what their magically solution was? Let your battery die and wait until after a certain hour on January 1st to plug it back in and all will be well. Gee, that’s swell. Good thing I didn’t want to listen to anything on my player on New Year’s Eve.