Surprise! Zune is incompatible with Vista

A toaster my wife bought before we met 14 years ago just crapped out. It has been an amazing piece of hardware, toasting up those little slices of whole wheat bread for the entire length of our relationship. It’s been to the repair shop once and now sadly, we think it’s time for it to go to kitchen appliance heaven.

How many of today’s machines can we rely on for over a decade? How many expired cell phones sit in your drawers? How many computer cases serve as doorstops in your world?

Never mind that our appetite for electronics is unsustainable. We just keep pumping it out, and it gets gobbled up. I’m as guilty as most people when it comes to consuming computers and gadgets, although I resist parking old TV sets in the back lane like some twerps.

Take the report that Microsoft’s new Zune music and media player is not compatible with Vista, the software behemoth’s soon to be released operating system.

Does it not speak volumes that the world’s largest software developer does not have the developer units from its 2 largest product launches of the year speaking to each other? How about just getting them together for a beer? Picture this –

– Hi, I work on Vista.
– Oh yeah? I work on Zune.
– Bottoms up!
– Hey, if I plug your little music doohickey in when running my groovy new OS, will it work?
– Er…

Why does this happen? Because of unrealistic ship dates for the delivery of software. Developers can’t work miracles, and the imperative of any software marketer is to go big, and top your last outing.

The Merry-Go-Round that is the release of a new Windows OS continues this trend. Everything I’ve read about Windows Vista makes it sound like bloatware’s crowning achievement: an operating system so resource hungry it won’t even run efficiently on a small fraction of today’s PCs.

Computer manufacturers and the computing media that serves them tingle at the thought of all those upgrades, and consequently, all that old hardware heading to the dump.

And that’s where they’ll find our faithful 15-year old toaster, which we will dearly miss.