Microsoft’s growing subculture

If there’s one thing I’ve learned from my two years immersed in an all Mac sanctum is that there’s a place in this world for both Microsoft and Apple. As I sit and listen to my team fawn over the latest creation of Steve Jobs I feel compelled to defend Microsoft to the death. It’s the old school-yard my bike/computer/favorite TV show/Dad is better than yours argument. Strangely though when I hear people fawning over Microsoft I feel compelled to stick my foot firmly in the Apple camp.

Recently, in a local Borders book store I stood in line waiting for a coffee (that still sounds strange to me, the combination of book store and cappuccino) when I spied a chap immersed in his Dell. I suddenly had an overpowering urge to run up and swipe the notebook from the table. “Oh my God, I’m sorry but there was a… a really nasty ‘Dell’ in front of you”.

Apple’s announcements last week of a revamped iTunes got the Apple fanboys in the office slavering. The key ingredient in the pie that got their juices flowing was the ‘Genius’ feature. The idea is that when you play a song the Genius feature will show you other similar songs in your library. As a neat customer activation feature it will also show you tunes in the store that you can click and buy. It’s a great idea, but the mixed reports I’ve heard within the office are that it’s a little temperamental. At the very least though, it’s a great way for Apple to bolster sales figures on the store as people explore new songs and bands they hadn’t heard before.

But, this isn’t really a big deal. You see, just as Apple was something of a subculture among nerds the world over prior to Mac OS X, Zune is now something of a growing subculture among music fans. It’s got a bad name I know. Owning a Zune these days reminds of me of being a kid in the 80’s and turning up at school in flared jeans. The other kids laughed and sniggered but, dammit, I was comfy and my pockets were huge!

The thing that got me thinking about all this was connecting my own Zune to my PC when I got home this evening. I fired up the Zune software and instantly saw a large banner about Rock Band 2. I clicked it and saw a custom mixtape (the Zune equivalent of an iPod playlist). I clicked download and the 70 tracks in the list started downloading. Then I noticed more there were already downloads running so I clicked on them to see what they were.

The extra downloads were from my rock channel. This is Zune’s equivalent to the ‘genius’ feature, but unlike ‘Genius’ it works. You see Zune is really a social network. The device itself can wirelessly connect with other zunes for you to share music. The Zune software shows you what your friends like and are listening too. The Channels feature aggregates play information from the thousands (hundreds?) of other Zune owners around the world and infers taste. If I listen to Disturbed’s Down With the Sickness and Robbie William’s Ego Has Landed a lot it will look at the music other people that are fans of those albums like. My Channel then gets updated. As I listen to the channel and vote up or down new tunes in it the Channel grows more refined. All I have to do is plug in my Zune and I’ve instantly got another 30 or so music tracks to listen to.

So, tonight my PC is downloading around 130 music tracks from mixtapes I want and channels I subscribe to, and it didn’t cost me a thing. Zune is a subscription service; you pay a monthly fee that’s less than a month’s membership of World of Warcraft and get unlimited access to all the music your ears can eat.

So, I smiled. I have iPods. I have Macs. I have PC’s and I have Zune. And there’s a place for them all. I love TV and movies on my iPod. There’s no way I’d do music on it though – tonight’s little excursion using ‘Genius’ would be nowhere near as high quality as Zune’s channels and would have cost me my entire monthly music budget 10 times over. No, I’ll just listen to the fanboys and smile wryly then explore more music than most sub-millionaire owning iPod owners could ever possibly imagine.