[geerlingguy]

Anybody remember the Zune? How different is Microsoft nowadays to make this actually work?

Most of their hardware products (not all... but most) end up being good, but not earth-shatteringly so, and either keep kind of moving on without taking any crowns (like Xbox), or slowly wither and die (Zune, Windows Phone).

Surface seems to be a good Halo product (not the game, ha!) so far, but I see very few Surfaces in the wild compared to any other laptop/tablet/desktops (mostly HP, some Dell, etc.).

[neogodless]

Be careful with anecdotes! Even your own experiences! The world is a very big place. The few different jobs I've worked over the past, say... 5 years... I've seen lots of places that were Dell from door to door, a mix of Macbooks and Surface, all Macbooks but a few had Surface as personal/toys, etc. At some places, they are popular and I think when you see them all the time you're more likely to buy one yourself. When no one you know has one you're less likely to get one. So it's helpful to dig up sales statistics if you can find them...

Perhaps the closest thing to a Zune that Microsoft makes today is the Surface Duo. It's very expensive with nice hardware, but the initial launch got some bad press from mediocre software. The software has likely gotten a lot better over time, so it will be interesting to see a version 2 here. But no one will be buying a $1400 Zune :)

[the-enterprise]

Microsoft is terrible at marketing anything to the common consumer and they always have been. That Windows dominates the consumer desktop dominant is a side effect.

Microsoft must always 2nd tier any consumer effort to their business of business.

[achalkley]

Zune was instrumental in many of the design systems we have today.

[pitterpatter]

I'm pretty inclined to think any custom CPUs will be for Azure specifically. They already have some custom hardware (e.g. FPGAs, ASICs) for different parts of the stack like storage and networking.

[christophilus]

I really liked the Zune. Also, it had a streaming service before Spotify was a thing, and you got to keep 10 songs per month permanently even if you canceled your subscription. I think it was much better than it got credit for.