The poor Zune has so much going against it. For one thing, they decided to make it brown; the most delicate way I’ve seen this put was something to the effect of, “The Zune team decided that brown was the hot new color. No other marketing team has reached this conclusion.”

I don’t like DRM, not even on my iPod, but the thing the iPod has going for it is that it’ll play that DRMed music. A lot of people complained that the Zune didn’t play half the formats of music they had.

And then there was the “orgasm screen,” a really bizarre screen during the installer that’s probably Not Safe for Work. Also probably NSFW is their logo upside-down, although that can be considered more bad luck than poor planning.

But I still gave them credit for trying. They have a terrible market share, but they tried.

Well! They just released the “Zune 2.0,” and, well, see for yourself. They did ditch the brown, although they also introduced “diarrhea green.” But I think this is even worse: the old one made me think, “Good for Microsoft, designing their own MP3 player.” Now I think, “Wow, it’s a bad clone of the iPod.” The looks are just too similar. They added some features, such as more video codecs, which is great. WiFi syncing to a computer? Awesome idea.

There is one thing that I think they got right, though. They failed the design, they failed the color choices (again), they failed having safe-for-work backgrounds in the installer screen, but they have a DRM-free music store now. I didn’t think Apple could lose its edge, but now Microsoft and Amazon are both offering DRM-free songs. And you know what? I don’t think I’m going to get my songs through iTunes anymore. Now that Linux is my primary OS, all the songs I bought from iTunes don’t play due to DRM. Apple’s got to do something, or it’s going to start losing, at least on music sales.