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I recall reading this story of some user doing a sync with Zune on their new computer. The computer had no songs on it and the Zune synced with that machine and

I recall reading this story of some user doing a sync with Zune on their new computer. The computer had no songs on it and the Zune synced with that machine and wiped all the existing music off his Zune without warning him(or something like that its been years). I recall thinking, yep thats Microsoft. And to this day I still encounter dumb ways of thinking in many of their products. The endless negative stories I hear about Windows 11 are just the tip of the iceberg. The entire company has to be following a cohesive vision with leadership at top needing to be truly involved to make great end to end products and really Microsoft has not been that in a long time.

hex4def6 22d ago
I remember Microsoft introduced a DRM / certification program they called "Playsforsure". Two years later they introduce the Zune, which could not play "Playsforsure" music people had purchased from MSN..
- microtonal 22d ago
  Heh, sounds like Windows Phone. Release Windows Phone 7, get early adopters and traction. Thank the early adopters by releasing Windows Phone 8, which is incompatible with existing Windows Phone 7 devices. Also make it use a new app development SDK so that Windows Phone 8 apps don't work on Windows Phone 7 (modulo some weird transition tech that almost nobody uses).
  - cjarrett 22d ago
    The funny thing was they could have done the adaptation--instead of doing it they just presumed devs would transition. They were also done with the android-apps-on-windowsphone project but dumped it because PC marketplace managers got mad at it because then devs wouldn't use their sdk. Luckily we still got the first version of WSL because of that project's partnership with that linux team.
- mrguyorama 21d ago
  And the Zune ecosystem had it's own DRM music format that also died IIRC. However, what the Zune ecosystem DID have that was insane for the time, was a $10 or so monthly subscription that let you listen to and download ANY song, as long as you had Wifi, with the bonus that you could download completely unprotected MP3s of ten of those songs a month. Songs at the time were still $1 each, so this was essentially free music streaming for people who bought songs regularly, with no potential for rug pulls. Outside of this subscription, you could loan a song to your friend, who could listen to it on their Zune like three times. They also had a nifty procedural playlist feature. They were trying to do social media of music! Microsoft used to be freaking nuts.
darg01 22d ago
I was a zune user. I had my music organised meticulously and could simply drag and drop to my zune from my (parents) windows desktop. It was simple and it was fantastic. Then I got a iPod so I needed to download iTunes. I downloaded iTunes, it told me to import my music. I imported my meticulously organised collection. It duplicated every single file into the iTunes approved format (AAC?) - my meticulous collection was now less meticulous, messy even. It caused me to swear off Apple products for decades. Though it also led me to some very basic programming in order to delete the duplicates. I was only partially successful. Programming led me to use Linux, before I eventually moved over to Mac. I like to think this was their plan all along.
- senderista 22d ago
  iTunes for Windows was indeed awful.
  - emsy 22d ago
    iTunes for Mac was also awful. I don’t know where the idea comes from that iTunes on Mac was good software but I remember reading that and getting a my first (then Intel) Mac and wondering why it got so much praise on Mac. It was the same software with slightly better UI but generally the same awful UX (except for drivers and performance which was never an issue on Win for me)
    - paradox460 22d ago
      Because back in the dawn of OS X it was legitimately a good music utility
  - -0_0- 22d ago
    As a hobbyist teen I built my own itunes clone for PC from scratch and remember getting so excited when Apple posted a job for someone to port iTunes officially. I remember getting so excited, then depressed when I realised a hobbyist teenager could never compete with the people Apple would have applying. Later seeing how bizarrely bloated iTunes for PC turned out, guess I probably could have.
MoonWalk 22d ago
To be fair, iTunes suffered from the same defect at one point. Microsoft is now a clinic on defective design, execution, and attitude. But back then it wasn't that bad. The iTunes case was also a classis UI 101 blunder combined with stupidity. If there was no iPod plugged in, the "Sync on connection" toggle in iTunes simply disappeared. First of all, when something is inapplicable, you grey it out. You don't just make it disappear. But in this case, even greying it out would have committed the same blunder, because the default state for this behavior was YES. So if the hard drive in your computer went bad and you installed the OS fresh on a new one, thinking that all your music was backed up on your iPod, you were right... until you plugged it in. So, so dumb. And finally: Apple never addressed the lack of "computer overwrites mobile" and "mobile overwrites computer," which Palm OS syncing nailed in the '90s.
- ColdStream 22d ago
  This weeks fun example of 'What will Windows 11 do today?' is that it suddenly wants to max out the Ethernet adapter with nothing. No packets are actually going anywhere but it just ends up hogging the entire data bus until you restart it once or twice. This is the kind of nonsense we have been putting up with for years.
  - MoonWalk 16d ago
    It never ends. So much of my day is wasted on Windows's defects and clumsiness.
m463 22d ago
to be honest, apple did this when it launched apple music. It did all kinds of things like hiding your music library, merging your music with apple's music, all kinds of nonsense. You used to be able to put your music on your phone easily, then it became sort of a gauntlet in favor of apple's subscription service.
Lukas_Skywalker 22d ago
I did the same when I tried to copy a friends music from his iPod to my iTunes library. Wiped his iPod instead. I think we have a tie there...
koyote 22d ago
One of the many reasons I moved away from ipods is because iTunes (which was awful; some of the worst software I've used) did the same thing to me just before I went on a trip. I thought to myself: "I better add these two new albums to my ipod so that I can listen to them while away". I plug in the ipod, itunes loads up, I walk away. I come back 10 minutes later and it had not finished yet and I wonder what is going on. Turns out it deleted my entire 40gb library off my ipod and started re-syncing. I had to leave so I unplugged the ipod but it was basically useless at that point. I do agree with Microsoft in general but Apple seems to be very much the same in my experience.
- ColdStream 22d ago
  iTunes was great in the beginning. If you can, find someone with a G3/G4 and OSX 10.4/10.5 and see just how snappy that thing feels even with a 100th the RAM of today and a spinning disk. A real nice piece of software. But then they just started dumping everything onto it and it eventually crumbled under the weight.
xp84 22d ago
I'm sure there are other examples, but you picked one here that is very unfair. > their new computer. The computer had no songs on it and the Zune synced with that machine and wiped all the existing music This is identical to the default way the iPod worked. If you bought a new Mac, and needed to get your music onto it, you had to use the migration assistant (connect via ethernet or firewire) or copy the music yourself. If you just plugged in your iPod to the new 'empty' mac and hit Sync, you'd lose your music too. This was done as a show of good faith to the RIAA - their nightmare was that users would go from one dorm room to the next, dumping all their music onto all their friends' PCs. As a result, an iPod (or indeed still an iPhone today) can only sync with one music library (aka one computer) at a time. If you put it in "manually manage" mode, you can copy onto the iPod/iPhone from a 'foreign' library, but you can still never copy in the other direction. And all of this is true even when your music has no DRM encryption.
socalgal2 22d ago
Oh, you mean like MacOS (OSX) installer deleting whole hard drives if there was a space in the volume name? It's so funny how fan boys can selectively ignore the bugs by their favorite company
nfriedly 22d ago
To be fair, I had that experience with my first iPod. As soon as I got it, I synced it with my computer and loaded up a ton of songs on it. This took a while. Some time later, I connected it to my dad's computer to put a couple more songs on it. The first thing it did when I hit "sync" was delete everything on the iPod. I learned that day that "sync" meant something different to Apple than it did to me. I'm sure it gave me some kind of prompt but it was not a clear "hey this is going to delete everything" prompt.

hex4def6 22d ago

I remember Microsoft introduced a DRM / certification program they called "Playsforsure". Two years later they introduce the Zune, which could not play "Playsforsure" music people had purchased from MSN..

microtonal 22d ago
Heh, sounds like Windows Phone. Release Windows Phone 7, get early adopters and traction. Thank the early adopters by releasing Windows Phone 8, which is incompatible with existing Windows Phone 7 devices. Also make it use a new app development SDK so that Windows Phone 8 apps don't work on Windows Phone 7 (modulo some weird transition tech that almost nobody uses).
- cjarrett 22d ago
  The funny thing was they could have done the adaptation--instead of doing it they just presumed devs would transition. They were also done with the android-apps-on-windowsphone project but dumped it because PC marketplace managers got mad at it because then devs wouldn't use their sdk. Luckily we still got the first version of WSL because of that project's partnership with that linux team.
mrguyorama 21d ago
And the Zune ecosystem had it's own DRM music format that also died IIRC. However, what the Zune ecosystem DID have that was insane for the time, was a $10 or so monthly subscription that let you listen to and download ANY song, as long as you had Wifi, with the bonus that you could download completely unprotected MP3s of ten of those songs a month. Songs at the time were still $1 each, so this was essentially free music streaming for people who bought songs regularly, with no potential for rug pulls. Outside of this subscription, you could loan a song to your friend, who could listen to it on their Zune like three times. They also had a nifty procedural playlist feature. They were trying to do social media of music! Microsoft used to be freaking nuts.

darg01 22d ago

I was a zune user. I had my music organised meticulously and could simply drag and drop to my zune from my (parents) windows desktop. It was simple and it was fantastic. Then I got a iPod so I needed to download iTunes. I downloaded iTunes, it told me to import my music. I imported my meticulously organised collection. It duplicated every single file into the iTunes approved format (AAC?) - my meticulous collection was now less meticulous, messy even. It caused me to swear off Apple products for decades. Though it also led me to some very basic programming in order to delete the duplicates. I was only partially successful. Programming led me to use Linux, before I eventually moved over to Mac. I like to think this was their plan all along.

senderista 22d ago
iTunes for Windows was indeed awful.
- emsy 22d ago
  iTunes for Mac was also awful. I don’t know where the idea comes from that iTunes on Mac was good software but I remember reading that and getting a my first (then Intel) Mac and wondering why it got so much praise on Mac. It was the same software with slightly better UI but generally the same awful UX (except for drivers and performance which was never an issue on Win for me)
  - paradox460 22d ago
    Because back in the dawn of OS X it was legitimately a good music utility
- -0_0- 22d ago
  As a hobbyist teen I built my own itunes clone for PC from scratch and remember getting so excited when Apple posted a job for someone to port iTunes officially. I remember getting so excited, then depressed when I realised a hobbyist teenager could never compete with the people Apple would have applying. Later seeing how bizarrely bloated iTunes for PC turned out, guess I probably could have.

MoonWalk 22d ago

To be fair, iTunes suffered from the same defect at one point. Microsoft is now a clinic on defective design, execution, and attitude. But back then it wasn't that bad. The iTunes case was also a classis UI 101 blunder combined with stupidity. If there was no iPod plugged in, the "Sync on connection" toggle in iTunes simply disappeared. First of all, when something is inapplicable, you grey it out. You don't just make it disappear. But in this case, even greying it out would have committed the same blunder, because the default state for this behavior was YES. So if the hard drive in your computer went bad and you installed the OS fresh on a new one, thinking that all your music was backed up on your iPod, you were right... until you plugged it in. So, so dumb. And finally: Apple never addressed the lack of "computer overwrites mobile" and "mobile overwrites computer," which Palm OS syncing nailed in the '90s.

ColdStream 22d ago
This weeks fun example of 'What will Windows 11 do today?' is that it suddenly wants to max out the Ethernet adapter with nothing. No packets are actually going anywhere but it just ends up hogging the entire data bus until you restart it once or twice. This is the kind of nonsense we have been putting up with for years.
- MoonWalk 16d ago
  It never ends. So much of my day is wasted on Windows's defects and clumsiness.

m463 22d ago

to be honest, apple did this when it launched apple music. It did all kinds of things like hiding your music library, merging your music with apple's music, all kinds of nonsense. You used to be able to put your music on your phone easily, then it became sort of a gauntlet in favor of apple's subscription service.

Lukas_Skywalker 22d ago

I did the same when I tried to copy a friends music from his iPod to my iTunes library. Wiped his iPod instead. I think we have a tie there...

koyote 22d ago

One of the many reasons I moved away from ipods is because iTunes (which was awful; some of the worst software I've used) did the same thing to me just before I went on a trip. I thought to myself: "I better add these two new albums to my ipod so that I can listen to them while away". I plug in the ipod, itunes loads up, I walk away. I come back 10 minutes later and it had not finished yet and I wonder what is going on. Turns out it deleted my entire 40gb library off my ipod and started re-syncing. I had to leave so I unplugged the ipod but it was basically useless at that point. I do agree with Microsoft in general but Apple seems to be very much the same in my experience.

ColdStream 22d ago
iTunes was great in the beginning. If you can, find someone with a G3/G4 and OSX 10.4/10.5 and see just how snappy that thing feels even with a 100th the RAM of today and a spinning disk. A real nice piece of software. But then they just started dumping everything onto it and it eventually crumbled under the weight.

xp84 22d ago

I'm sure there are other examples, but you picked one here that is very unfair. > their new computer. The computer had no songs on it and the Zune synced with that machine and wiped all the existing music This is identical to the default way the iPod worked. If you bought a new Mac, and needed to get your music onto it, you had to use the migration assistant (connect via ethernet or firewire) or copy the music yourself. If you just plugged in your iPod to the new 'empty' mac and hit Sync, you'd lose your music too. This was done as a show of good faith to the RIAA - their nightmare was that users would go from one dorm room to the next, dumping all their music onto all their friends' PCs. As a result, an iPod (or indeed still an iPhone today) can only sync with one music library (aka one computer) at a time. If you put it in "manually manage" mode, you can copy onto the iPod/iPhone from a 'foreign' library, but you can still never copy in the other direction. And all of this is true even when your music has no DRM encryption.

socalgal2 22d ago

Oh, you mean like MacOS (OSX) installer deleting whole hard drives if there was a space in the volume name? It's so funny how fan boys can selectively ignore the bugs by their favorite company

nfriedly 22d ago

To be fair, I had that experience with my first iPod. As soon as I got it, I synced it with my computer and loaded up a ton of songs on it. This took a while. Some time later, I connected it to my dad's computer to put a couple more songs on it. The first thing it did when I hit "sync" was delete everything on the iPod. I learned that day that "sync" meant something different to Apple than it did to me. I'm sure it gave me some kind of prompt but it was not a clear "hey this is going to delete everything" prompt.