Not a good week for Microsoft.

First, Yahoo and Google are being cliquish and won’t let the Borg play with them on the internets.

And now there’s more bad news from the Zune division. (Team colors: Poopy brown.) The WSJ ($) reports:

Videogame retailer GameStop Corp. plans to stop selling Microsoft Corp.’s Zune media player due to insufficient demand.

GameStop’s already pulled its stock of Zunes from its stores. The media players will be available via GameStop’s Web site until supplies are exhausted. The Zune “didn’t have the appeal” that GameStop expected, a spokesman said.

Adam Sohn, Microsoft’s Zune marketing manager, said in response that Zune sales “have seen good momentum” during the last few months, and that there’s been a “great response to our spring release.”

This didn’t look like that big of a deal until I noticed that GameStop had 4500 retail outlets. Who knew? (EB Games stores are part of the same company, it turns out.) Microsoft has allegedly sold two million Zunes since its debut a year and a half ago. If GameStop had fifteen percent of the Zune market (I’m pulling that figure out of a hat) it would mean the company averaged about one sale per store per week. (Apple, by contrast, is selling iPods at the rate of nearly a million per week.)

Meanwhile, tucked away in the Times today was a story about how Microsoft has quietly stopped scanning books for its Live Search service. In the modern world of search, book scanning is one of the brave new frontiers, and Google, of course, has encountered all sorts of heat for its attempts to scan everything it can get its hands on. The Times:

Digitizing books and archiving academic journals no longer fits with the company’s plan for its search operation, wrote Satya Nadella, senior vice president of Microsoft’s search and advertising group, in a blog post Friday.

Microsoft will take down two separate sites for searching the contents of books and academic journals next week, and Live Search will direct Web surfers looking for books to non-Microsoft sites, the company said.

Nadella said Microsoft will focus on ”verticals with high commercial intent.”

“Verticals with high commercial intent.” And Microsoft wonders why consumers aren’t connecting with its products.

It seems like only yesterday I was reading all those full-page ads for Microsoft’s big plans for “Live Search.” It was in fact just 18 months ago, or right about the time the company started rolling out the Zune.

If I recall correctly, the ads said, “We’re in this for the long haul, or until we decide instead to focus more on verticals with high commercial intent.”

The company’s interest in those verticals, incidentally, will soon come back to bite hapless Zune owners in the ass. Recently, we saw what happened to customers of Microsoft’s previous music service, the MSN Store, when it was shut down last month. (The MSN Store sold music, like the iTunes Store.) The company could have easily transported its customers there to the new “Zune Marketplace.” Instead, it’s basically disconnecting the service. The songs you bought on it, tied up in digital rights management, will work as long as you keep your current computer. But when you upgrade, you’re screwed, and they disappear.

I don’t think too many people will be re-buying the songs from the Zune Marketplace, but I suppose the company could be a little more aggressive in trying to market their way out of this mess.

(Confidential to B.G.: Try to convince folks that “MSN” had nothing to do with the operation that suddenly repossessed all their music. It was the “Store” part, and the new Zune operation isn’t a “store,” it’s a “marketplace.”)

(By the way, Apple uses DRM, too, and it should be noted that, in theory, the company could pull the same sleazy trick.)

Once the Zune, inevitably, gets 86′ed by the company for its poor verticals, no doubt the company will again forgo allowing their customers to move the songs they paid for to a new computer. For that operation, the customers, far from being verticals, will be horizontals, and not face up, either.