There is a strange logical force field around the Microsoft Zune that makes it hard to think about clearly. It seems like every article I read about it doesn’t make sense; there are non sequiturs, or irrelevant or insufficient information. Here’s an example, from a recent Wired News piece on the release of the mp3 player’s second iteration:

The most ballyhooed (and misunderstood) feature of the first Zunes was their wireless music sharing feature, which ran aground after owners noticed there was no one around to share with.

With the new Zunes released Tuesday, Microsoft has moved “the social” back where it belongs: other companies’ social networks. Users of the free Zune software can embed a widget that shows their most recent, most frequently played and favorite tracks on Facebook, MySpace and so on — wherever HTML is used.

Doesn’t this not make sense? What does listing songs you’re listening to (or rather, have listened to) on Facebook have to do with the Zune’s wireless sharing feature? And who cares about that in any case? You’ve been able to show off the music you’re listening to on IM programs for years; why is a marginal software feature worth mentioning so substantively in a description of a multi-hundred-dollar piece of hardware?

After the articles talking about the Zune’s new models last month, the player to me at least seemed to have dropped out of public consciousness. It was a surprise to see it back in a flurry of articles this weekend, and now my head is hurting again.

A story in USA Today says that the Zune is hot hot hot!:

As much as they may swoon, some holiday shoppers may not be able to get a Zune.

…is the story’s euphonious, buzzy lede. The immediate impression you have is that the Zune is suddenly jumping off shelves; but if you read down a bit, you learn that Microsoft made a decision to manufacture more of its smaller flash Zunes and fewer of the 80-gig hard-drive model. Since the piece never says how many the company made or how may have been sold, you suspect that the “shortage” is manufactured. Or rather, wasn’t manufactured. No one was swooning, either, incidentally.

Similarly, over at CNN Money, an article there has the exciting hedline “Retail hordes go loony over Zune”. But when you read that story, you find out that here, too, euphony gets in the way of accuracy. No one’s going loony—unless you want to be unkind to the folks in the story, who were trying to buy last year’s Zune, one of the more ridiculed products in recent tech history. Why on earth? Turns out a Toys ‘R’ Us in Manhattan had them as a Black Friday loss leader, on sale for 80 bucks, or 60 percent off the list price.

Indeed, there was even a short story on PC World that says that the Zune was number one on Amazon’s list of best-selling mp3 players. That’s a pretty stunning bit of news—until you read on to find out that, again, it was a heavily discounted year-old model that (briefly) topped the list, which in any case featured Ipods in 15 of the top 25 slots.

Daniel Eran Dilger’s Roughly Drafted site, incidentally, has a very cold analysis of why the Zune won’t be successful in this iteration. (Link via Slashdot.) Writes Dilger:

Microsoft doesn’t seem to learn from its mistakes in consumer electronics very well. When it does however, it frequently gets the timing wrong. This year, Microsoft appears set to compete against the Apple of 2006. It now offers two flash models, last year’s leftover 30 GB unit, and new 80 GB version.

Wrong Products: The problem is that Apple moved the goalpost dramatically. Apple’s new 3G Nano is ultra thin and small, but delivers the same video resolution as Microsoft’s boxy flash Zunes at the same price. It also plays games.

Microsoft also has no match for the standout iPod Touch, which delivers a luxury product with WiFi store features, web browsing, and YouTube streaming for about the same price as Microsoft’s hard drive based players. Microsoft seems to think it is competing against last Apple’s 2005 iPod refreshed for 2006.

Later in the piece he claims (and seems to have the screenshots to prove) that a WSJ online poll asking folks what products they were planning on buying this season had the Zune at zero percent—until:

Microsoft discovered the embarrassment, and the next day there were 16,481 new votes, 14,999 of which happened to be Wall Street Journal readers exclusively excited about the Zune. That’s over 91% of the readers of an article that had fallen out of sight by that time. There aren’t that many people on Earth who have heard of the Zune and read the Wall Street Journal.