I'm writing a story for a leading Australian computing publication on MP3 players. In looking at a number of different MP3 players and some other associated topics I did some digging on Microsoft's Zune.

The original Zune, adorned in its somewhat "interesting" brown casing, was meant to be Microsoft's foray into the portable music player market. Now, no-one enters that market unless they're prepared to compete with Apple. Love them or hate them, Apple has defined the MP3 player market in the same way Xerox did with photocopiers. Apple's products aren't the best featured products on the market. They are, however, the best total package when combined with the iTunes software.

How did Microsoft choose to compete when the released the Zune in November 2006? They only released it in some parts of the world, immediately limiting their potential market penetration. Their key diffrentiating feature, the ability to share music with other Zune owners, was way too complicated and they completely disenfrachised owners of other Microsoft certified players by not supporting the Plays for Sure DRM system that was embraced by many of Apple's competitors. Music that had been previously purchased wasn't going to play on the Zune.

Just to top things off, after ramming Media Player down our throats as the be all and end all of media players Micorosft throw up (literally as well as figuratively) the Zune software that's needed for media management and access to the Zune store. So, as well as making one of the key features hard to use, they made people reorganise the way they manage their media.

A year after the Zune's release not much has changed. The Zune is still in limited release - Aussies can't buy one other than through resellers that source them from overseas. A few weeks ago Zune 2 was released with a flash memory model pitching it in direct opposition to the iPod Nano. The older, hard-disk based units received a free software update so that they were functionally similar to the new models so older units were effectively given a new lease on life.

The new Zunes have broader video-format support than the iPod and are on a par, in my view, with respect to audio-format support. Is the Zune as good or better than the iPod? I don't know and frankly, it's not important. What is important is that the marketplace is competitive. At the moment, I don't see Microsoft behaving competitively. They've got a product out there but it all seems a little too "Field of Dreams" for me - "if we build it they will come". Saying that they won't roll the Zune out globally till deals are made with record companies is dumb. The iPod was released globally and available for years before the iTunes Store was international. Even now the iTunes Store is limited to a smattering of countries. Yet, the iPod still sells in huge quantities.

Strike 1, strike 2...

Microsoft usually needs three releases before they get things right. Who amongst us used Windows 1 and 2? Not too many. However, Windows 3 (particularly 3.1) took the market by storm and laid the foundation for today's operating system dominance. Windows CE (the foundation under the Windows Mobile platform) was pretty usless in its first couple of incarnations. Once the third release came, the handheld PC platform, it began to grab serious market traction and steal sales from the dominant market player, Palm.

Zune 1 and 2 have established that Microsoft can make a competent, though not brilliant, portable media player. I'm hoping that Zune 3 will see a gobal release and file off the rough edges of the previous releases. Perhaps Zune 3 will be the one that takes the international market by storm and gives Apple some much-needed competition.