Ipods are cool and sleek. A timeline of the history of design in the store Design Within Reach has the pod as the pinnacle of the evolution of design. And they sure are popular. But I’ve felt for a while that ipod’s market dominance is more a result of marketing than quality. In fact, in concert with itunes online music distribution, Apple has approached monopolistic dominance in the emerging digital music market. There’s got to be better value for the money.

One of the big problems I have with the mighty pod is directly related to its market dominance. And it bugs me is that almost no one talks about this. A given ipod can only be used with a certain number (3 maybe) of registered computers (that is without some kind of funky and unauthorized software), and even more striking is that music files can’t be transfered from an ipod to a computer. Music can only go from computer to ipod. Once again, that’s unless unauthorized software is used. This is certainly purposefully designed to maintain Apple’s hegemony on digital music distribution which approaches vertical integration. Functionally, this is a major limitation and I’m amazed that there hasn’t been more open criticism. Maybe Microsoft should re-edit the Hillaried re-edit of the famous Orwellian Apple commercial - placing Ipod in the screen where Hillary was.

So I’ve pulled the trigger and ordered the Zune. Both the 80 gig Zune and 80 gig Ipod cost around $249. The Zune gets slightly better average user and reviewer ratings on cnet than the pod. I’m pretty sure that Zune doesn’t have a closed file transfer system like ipod. My major concern is how difficult it may prove to be to import my itunes catalogue into the zune software. I will keep you posted.

Zune also has two cool features that ipod doesn’t: FM radio, and wireless synching and sharing (which probably can be used with any computer).

So to paraphrase a political maxim, when the revolution becomes the orthodoxy, even Microsoft can become the rebel. I wonder how Chuck Berry feels about this…