Mass outage of 30 gig Zunes; Microsoft working on response
Reports are streaming in from round the Web of Microsoft’sitting 30 gigabyte Zune media players failing all at once. Here’sitting any some one’sitting description, consistent with thousands of others instructed steady a Zune forum and in comments to blogs:
“I turned without interruption my Zune a few hours ago, and the start-up mask appeared. The progress body of lawyers went across the lowest part, and stopped at 100%
“And it just sits there.”
The Zune team is issuing the following statement:
“We are aware that customers with the Zune 30GB are experiencing issues with their Zune device. We are actively working now to isolate the issue and develop a discontinuance to address it. We will keep customers informed on nearest steps via the support page on zune.unadulterated (zune.net/support).”
Clearly, this is not the kind of consumer electronics advice story Microsoft wanted to see individual week prior to its chief executive and entertainment and devices president take the stage at the Consumer Electronics Show.
Update, 10:45 a.m.: Matt Rosoff, a digital music expert and analyst with Directions without ceasing Microsoft in Kirkland, checked his 30 gig Zune this morning and confirmed, “I’ve got that pink and black screen of death.” Rosoff has a theory about what’s gone iniquitous.
Microsoft introduced its 30 gigabyte Zune in fall 2006 in a bid to be rivals with the iPod, Apple’session runaway success. The hardware was basically a tweaked Toshiba Gigabeat. “The first model, Microsoft did not manufacture and design itself,” Rosoff said. “They slapped some modern software on this Gigabeat to get the brand out in that place and get the product established in the market.”
Microsoft shipped more than 1 very great number 30 gig Zunes previous to phasing out the product in 2007 in favor of hard-disk carriage-road based players with further storage and Flash players with less.
Rosoff speculated that because barely these older 30-gig Zunes appear to be affected, the problem stems from the interaction between a precise chip and the Zune firmware. Microsoft issued new firmware for the Zune this fall.
“The actuality that they’re all failing at once suggests that there’s some sort of BIOS problem, something in the chip that they used, some sort of clocking mechanism that ran out of time or something like that,” he said.
Despite the moot point occurring come to close quarters to the new year, he doesn’t determine that’s the source of the failure. “I’ve seen some speculation that it’session like a Y2K type of bug caused by the new year. That doesn’t seem that may be liked because I don’t think the Zune has any absolute clock in it. I think it’s got a relative clock. … It doesn’t know that it’s December 31st.”
“Rather,” Rosoff wrote in a blog post for we spoke, “it probably counts a sum total number of seconds seeing that some particular zero date near the device’sitting creation. So that clock might have reached a number that’s over large for the field created to grasp it, but the fact that it happened on the last day of 2008 is probably an inappropriate coincidence. It’s almost funny, omit for the fact that I’ve got 25GB of music locked up on this brick.”
Whatever the cause, this be possible to only bring headaches to Microsoft, that Rosoff and many others expect to announce a new strategic direction for the Zune brand. Rosoff said:
“Microsoft is still a bit player in this market and I’m expecting them to refocus their Zune strategy in succession mobile phones and really make it part of their overall mobile entertainment strategy, not just this dedicated MP3 player. I calculate upon them to do something like that this year. Might announce it at CES, might announce it later.
“If they’re going to talk hither and thither the Zune at CES this certainly gives detractors a lot of munition.”
While the tech gadget echo-chamber is in a tizzy about this mass failure, some Zune owners are keeping things in view. The man who described his Zune failure at the lop of this post followed up in an e-mail:
“I’m certainly irritated and I fail MS to take solicitude of it, but perspective… There’s homeless people out there shivering in the cold and going hungry, human slavery still going on in the globe, and yet people are seething mad about their digital music sign not working.”
Original text: http://blog.seattletimes.nwsource.com/techtracks/2008/12/31/mass_outage_of_30_gig_zunes_microsoft_working_on_r.html
