[qingcharles]

I was sometimes involved in this project at MS. The music buying experience for Zune was awful, and I regret missed opportunities to be more forceful about telling the Windows Media execs that they were fucking up. Part of the problem was MS insistence on being fair to everyone and having an open system which led to 5000 shitty online stores where you could buy music. Instead of Apple that had exactly one where they owned and controlled the entire vertical.

This was the whole reason for creating Zune. Again, MS had licensed out their awful Windows Media products to 100 Chinese digital music player makers and got a fragmented market of trash, so MS jumped in to try and do it the right way themselves, but sadly too late.

I think the flat Metro UI evolved out of all the work we did coming out of the Windows Media division. I based all the flat design work I was doing for MS on British Sky TV's set top box graphics, simply because they were easiest for my developer brain to code and they also worked really well:

https://youtu.be/-26xPkRXtsU

[com2kid]

We chose a strict flat metro style on Microsoft Band because it was super easy to render with the tiny CPU we had! All squares and monochrome icons meant we could render at an absurd FPS.

[philistine]

What you’re describing is enlightening, thank you for sharing. The music purchasing workflow involved collaboration with the marketing people at Apple, which explains their successes.

[qingcharles]

What's funny is that Microsoft and its partners did all the groundwork to open up the labels and gave Apple an easy ride. I was working with Peter Gabriel and he could call any record label in the world and get us a meeting to show the demos. The startup I was working for would go in and it would spend a lot of energy proving to the labels that digital was the endgame and CDs were eventually going to die. This was a very hard job.

And then a couple of weeks after each demo we'd get a call from the labels and they would tip us off that Apple had come to show them something special that they were working on, and of course that meeting went a lot easier than ours...

(also every record label on Earth was using Macs not PCs, so Microsoft's software either had to be run on a laptop we took, or we had to show them Microsoft's absolutely awful Mac software. PG, bless him, gave me his personal iBook for testing (complete with all his passwords and AOL account), which he probably got from Jobs, but I was in a belligerent anti-Mac era so I shoved it in a closet with the button nailed down and stuck it on that "hold the button" game for two years)

[losses]

Wait, 5000 is an actual number?