Zune gets a Jobs-esque price cut
Deal-a-day Web site Woot.com is offering Microsoft's Zune player for $129, just a month after it offered the same Zune for $20 more.
(Credit:
Microsoft)
Having learned a thing from Apple's iPhone mess, the folks at Woot are taking no chances (or rather, seizing a chance to poke great fun at the turtlenecked one), the company is reaching out to those who paid the higher price.
The site posted an "emergency open letter" and is offering a coupon to all those who bought the Zune last month for $149.
"Being in technology for 1+years, give or take a year, I can attest to the fact that the technology road is bumpy," Woot "CYA Officer" Larry Stalin said in the faux-pology. "There is always some idiot changing lanes without signaling, and the potholes never seem to get fixed. If you always wait for the next price cut or to buy the new improved model, you'll never buy any technology product. I mean, why should you? Truth is, you don't really need any of this junk. We're afraid you'll catch on to that fact and overpaid frauds like me will have to go back into fields like telemarketing and burrito construction."
Customers who bought the Zune the last time around can get $10 off their next $40 purchase.
"We want to convincingly pretend to do the right thing for our valued Zune customers," the site said. "We'd apologize for disappointing some of you, but we long ago lost the capacity for sincere remorse. We will continue to do our best to trick you into having high expectations of Woot."
The company highlighted its rationale behind the price cut.
"It benefits both Woot and every Zune user (but especially Woot) to drag as many new victims as possible into the Zune 'dungeon,'" it said. "We strongly believe that misery loves company this holiday season."
It's a brilliant read, slamming both Microsoft and Jobs, while at the same time probably racking up more than a few sales.
During her years at CNET News, Ina Fried has changed beats several times, changed genders once, and covered both of the Pirates of Silicon Valley. These days, most of her attention is focused on Microsoft. E-mail Ina. 
In a very astute move, they made a brown one. It exudes cool from every socket. If only they'd just made the brown one, thus preventing the ignorant massed from making a hideous fashion mistake, iPod would be all but history by now.
It's roughly the same size as most hard-drive MP3 players, has a nice screen, and does pretty much what you expect it to do. Sure, the wifi included is pretty useless - that's basically a fact. However, it's actually quite competent compared to most MP3 players. Obviously iPods are 'nice' and all that, but I still hold that they have their share of gimmicks (hype being one of them).
And it's being offered at a reasonable price.
I know that Zune/MS-bashing and owning an iPod makes you look cool, but to some it also makes you look stupid :)
go further, because it also describes the entire Windows
expderience. In 1990 I bought an IBM PC with Windows. After
spending 65% of my time troubleshooting and reinstalling after
virus attacks, I decided to try an Apple computer. I now own 7
of them, including an original Mac Classic Color, that I use for
word processing. That Mac is 16 years old, and my newest, a
Mac Pro, is 4 months old. I have NEVER had to reinstall any
software on any of these machines, nor have I ever had a virus
or hardware breakdown.
Beautiful, functional, secure and reasonably priced are words I
would use to describe Apple products.
Bulky and unintuitive are perfect for Windows and it's
corresponding non-Mac PCs.
valued Zune customers.
You can do the right thing by telling folks to find a better device.
I'm a happy Zen Vison:M owner, which is very similar to the Zune. I don't gouge my eyes out every time I go to use it. People need to get over themselves with this ridiculous anti-everything crap.
Comparing Zune with iPod and PC to Mac is like comparing Ford fusion to BMW (couldn't recall any other vehicle). BMW is much better with cool features but you pay so much more for that. So why complain when you paid less for Ford fusion. You get what you pay for. Nobody is focing anyone to buy PC, or Mac for that matter.
Grow up !
Of course people drive BMWs and people buy and use Macs. But, when reading the context of my original post, 5% of the market share is nothing when talking about viruses.
People complain about viruses on Windows machines. Well, virus programmers TARGET Windows machines because they are on 90% of the computers in the world. The fact that viruses don't exist on Macs is not Apple superiority. It's because virus programmers don't want to waste their time.
firm I can tell you that there is plenty of fame for the first person who successfully exploits and
proliferates Mac based virus. Just like the guy who recently cracked the iPhone (way less than 5%
market share), there is fame to be had!! Macs are not inferior but they are very challenging to have
a exploit proliferate and spawn. They are a beast to code exploites for in a real world
environments on a mass scale. Perfect? NO!! But tougher than Windows? YES yes YES!!!
The first person in the very tight underground world of hacking will find great fame when they
generate the first mass exploit for the Mac. With a company that is selling over 8 million plus
macs a year we are looking a very substantial impact and I can tell you now that this will be front
page news on all channels when it does happen. Ignorance is bliss my friend so wake up and get
over you bias. The market share debate is bogus as there is plenty of fame for the first successful
exploit!!! In fact it will be huge and Mac heads will be humbled.
In OSX' five years of existence, there have been zero successful worms or viruses for it. None. Even the somewhat competent attention-***** of a 'researcher' who ran the "Month of Apple Bugs" couldn't find more than a short handful of vulnerabilities for the OS - and most of what he did report belonged to 3rd-party or ancillary apps, not the kernel. These evaporated in very short order, when Apple released patches for them... and a 3rd-party programmer was happily patching each one almost within hours of discovery. Could MSFT do that?
Not that OSX flaws don't exist, but that they are by and large either obscure, unusable, or do little to nothing.
To top that off, a gent at the University of Wisconsin (in 2006, I believe) challenged anyone to break a Mac Mini, which plugged in to the Internet in a standard configuration with no real attention paid to securing it beyond the defaults. The university finally stopped it because their bandwidth was soaked by the number of people doing their level best to try. As it turned out, the Mini stood unbroken. This alone blows away your argument that popularity determines targeting.
I'm not saying that OSX is invulnerable... far from it. What I am saying is that it will take a whole hell of a lot more work to find and exploit one than it currently does with Windows. The bar is high enough to put a serious dent in the number of people who could pull it off. If OSX suddenly shot up to 90% of the desktop market, the pool of script kiddies would almost vanish due to the lack of skills required to pop an OSX box remotely. Bots and Zombie networks would be almost unheard of.
Until then, we got... Windows and its coterie of bots, zombies, stealth updates, and swiss-cheese security.
/P
www.microsoftdefenseforce.com cNet? I'm just curious, looks like
GoDaddy has it available.
face to all loyal Zune customers of good standing for the last
three months. I paid good money for this mediocre machine and
now you're cutting the price because people STILL aren't buying
it.
I feel like a sucker for buying a Zune. Now you make me feel
even MORE like a loser by showing everyone that I paid too
much money for it. Is there no end to Microsoft's ability to
humiliate me?
Maybe I'll just upgrade from Vista to XP to calm down...
- Forget the Zune (not hard) - that open letter was FUNNY!
- by dotmike September 21, 2007 10:38 PM PDT
- Pretty near perfect parody of the Jobs one.
- Like this Reply to this comment
-
(31 Comments)If you don't start laughing at the first paragraph, then I suspect
you've recently woken up in a bath of ice cubes with your sense
of humor removed.
"I have received more than three emails from Zune buyers who
are upset ... After reading every one of these emails, or at least
scanning their subject lines, I have some observations and
conclusions.
"First, I need to make a better effort to hide my email address."
LOL.