Bill Gates, in a small group of high profile bloggers said that he is not happy the way DRM is done. He expressed his disappointment in the overall situation with DRM. He said “it causes too much pain for legitimate buyers”.
He said:

DRM is not where it should be, but you won’t get me to say that there should be usage models and different payment models for usage. At the end of the day, incentive systems do make a difference, but we don’t have it right with incentives or interoperability.

In summary Bill Gates said:

People should just buy a CD and rip it. You are legal then.

Why people are loving their Zune players? Here are some of the comments posted by Zune users:

I have both Zune as well as iPod. But nowadays I am loving my Zune more than iPod because Zune marketplace gives me option of “unlimited downloads” which is not available in Apple iPod.

I love the big bright screen of my black zune. I also love the big album art. I can select media items next to each other without passing them by 10 times like in iPod.

I love the large screen of Zune and the FM tuner. Yes, I use the tuner a lot.

I got a zune on the first day, very excited about the hype. I must say that this thing is truely a dream. I have had no issues, and have even met up with a few zuners on campus. I look fwd to microsoft smaller flash base model. As for the marketplace, it is getting better everyday! I love the subscription model! The sound quality is wonderful too! FM tuner is really cool in the city where stations broadcast over the airwaves what song and artist is playing

I love the bigger screen, same battery life, and I like the operating sysmte of Zune better. The wireless is a great feature (maybe not fully useful yet, but updates happen) and the FM radio is excellent.

Microsoft said today that it expects around 1 million Zune player sales in the first six months of 2007. In comparison to Apple’s iPod, which sold 39 millions iPods in last 12 months, it is vary small figure. But, Bryan Lee, corporate VP for Microsoft’s Entertainment Group thinks, “We think that’s actually pretty awesome.” But he also said that he expects his company to be eventually a leader in it.

As of now, the Zune media player is only available in USA. Its sales figure are expected to go high as and when it goes international. But if we believe its initial sales numbers, it is not expected to be any blockbuster.

Microsoft and Tandberg has enabled Zune-optimized content creation with their Tandberg Content Server, which is a Windows-based audio/video streaming solution. With this, any standard video conference can be recorded/converted/optimized for Zune based video playing.

With the Tandberg Content Server, Microsoft Zune not only enables people to enjoy their favorite songs or videos, but to catch up on important training sessions or product presentations when and where they want,

Said Fredrik Halvorsen, CEO for Tandberg.

Zune has a share-once restriction which only allows you to share the song only once with your friend using WiFi.

Now with this small hack, you and your friend can share that same song again and again as many times as you like. So you and your friend both has to do this:

Steps:

1. Connect your Zune to your PC and start the Zune software.
2. Open My Computer. Click on Zune link.
3. Open Storage inside Zune link
4. Delete the files with the name of the person who transferred songs to you.
5. Ask your friend to do the same.

Now you can transfer the same song again and again.
So enjoy.

Microsoft was planning to reward song sharing with their Zune player. On 11th of November, J. Allard and Christina Calio, from the Microsoft Zune team, talked about implementing such feature. Zune team is planning to reward users with Marketplace Points, the same points you use on both Zune Marketplace and Xbox 360 Marketplace.

Here is another news of Microsoft is trying a collaboration with Weedshare. Microsoft is buying Weedshare’s IP.

Microsoft signed a patent non-assertion agreement that grants Shared Media Licensing the rights to exploit its patent and any patents related to it without fear of legal repercussions. So if Microsoft should roll out a Zune compensated sharing program based on it, Shared Media Licensing and Weedshare already are in a unique position to leverage it for their own benefit.

Zune Media Player sales for the first week are being considered good by an executive at NPD Group, the market research firm. Ross Rubin told that in major US electronic stores Zune is second in sales, just next to Apple iPod. He also estimated the Zune market share to be at around nine percent, which is not bad at all.

Today, CNN also has a story telling “Zune is number 2 Digital Audio player in its first week of sales”. Not a bad start at all. But at Amazon online store, iPod is still holding 8 out of 10 top slots. Other two are held by SanDisk. Zune is not in top 10 mp3 models there. Some people suspect that it may be because of the sales division in 3 different colors of Zune mp3 players.

With a little trick, you can make Zune
think of any file as an image file and hence can send it to other Zune player.

Before starting this hack, you need to put Zune USB Drive Hack into place. With this hack you can put any file into your Zune from your computer as your Zune is just any other USB drive hard disk.

You can just replace the extension on file on your computer to .jpg and sync it with your Zune
. Then send this file wirelessly to other Zune player from your Zune. Remember to include some more actual .jpg files with it. Then receiver zune can sync it up with PC and rename it back.

I know its not a great hack, but just if you want to tryl.

It was posted at zuneboards

I highly recommend backing up these registry values before modifying anything. If you don’t know how to do that, I don’t recommend that you even attempt this right now =)

1. Make sure your Zune
is not plugged in and your Zune software isn’t running
2. open up regedit by going to the start menu and selecting “run”. Type regedt32 and hit “OK”
3. Browse to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\ControlSet001\Enum\USB\
4. Search for “PortableDeviceNameSpace”. This should be contained in the Vid_####&Pid_####\########_-_########_-_########_-_########\Device Parameters within the above …\USB\ The ##’s listed here will be numbers and letters specific to your Zune
5. Change the following values:
* EnableLegacySupport to 1
* PortableDeviceNameSpaceExcludeFromShell to 0
* ShowInShell to 1
6. Plug in your Zune, and make sure the Zune Software starts up.
7. Hopefully at this point you can open up “My Computer” and browse your device, though it does NOT show up as a drive letter.

Right now I can access it both as a harddrive and sync through the Zune
Software.

eBay is selling rare limited edition of Zune in pink color. It seems only 100 of pink Zune players are for sale. So grab them now.