Zune and Microsoft Media Deals



There is a very interesting post by Andrew Baron from Rocketboom where he turned down some sort of Zune deal with Microsoft. I am sitting here with my mouth wide open, first of all he publicly posted the refusal letter he sent them. If Microsoft approached me on a media buy of some sort their is no way that I would ever post my response letter online. You just don’t do that.

Talk about a way to burn some bridges. The details of the offer have not been made public, but this is going to cause a lot of speculation, and bring a great deal of scrutiny now to any podcast or videocast that runs a Zune promotional piece. We will all wonder what stipulations of the sponsorship are.

Andrew says that having the Zune logo on his site would restrict him from saying bad things about Microsoft. Well maybe Microsoft needs some people in their corner that are willing to be critical and give users a back channel conduit into there development process.

The companies I work with here get feedback, positive and negative, and I never hold back anything. But they are smart they take that feedback and improve their product line or fix a issue. Thus when I say something critical I can always back that up with a comment on what the company is doing to address the concern.

Regardless it is very apparent to me that Podcast Support will be in the Zune shortly, being I did not get a demo unit, I will be buying one tomorrow. [www.dembot.com]