Don’t take it from me, how about the most influential gadget guy in the world over at Engadget!

Installing the Zune sucked.

Shocker :) .

Through all the hype, it was obvious what one of the many problems would be with Zune – after all it’s a Microsoft product.

Awful name (Microsoft Bob anyone), lame images and marketing right out of the shoot, horrible packaging and now from EnGadget – difficult to get loaded and working.

The worst time to have a problem is right out of the box. Marketing 101 for anyone making products for consumers. There is no worse time to screw up than right after a box is ripped open.

Congrats again to Microsoft. What did people expect? They can’t make phone software work either and they have had 10 years to fix.

Predictable launch. The only ones smiling are Apple shareholders. Stock is up $4 bucks the last few days right “IN YOUR FACE” to Microsoft. The money is making their bets that the Zune will be more hype than hurt.

UPDATE – The comments are very informative to the Engadget article. People wanted this Zune to work. After all, Microsoft is an underdog and America loves the underdog.

This comment is the most thoughtful on the subject:

JerkyChew @ Nov 13th 2006 9:13PM
Wow. That’s just amazing – what a mess. Let’s pretend that nothing crashed and it worked as advertised; there’s still what, fifteen to twenty steps just to set up the player? Registrations all over the place, picking names, connecting with your Passport account? WTF?

Microsoft, look: You’re going up against a player (as in the company, not the device) with 75% of the marketplace. A player known above all for their interface and usability. A player whose software “just works”, and just works on operating systems created by you.

New products have bugs, and there will always be glitches. But you can’t afford to be this screwed up. Face it, you get no leniency here. To extend the music metaphor a bit, you are the 800-pound gorilla, the supergroup that everyone has already heard of, and is sitting there with open arms saying, “impress us”. You can either step up and be Audioslave, or you can skate along and be The New Doors. You only get one shot at this point.

Your average consumer is not going to be a computer person – they’re just somebody that wants to hear their music. This is the piece that Apple got – Keep them within three clicks of their music, don’t make it much harder to use than a walkman, and don’t jam features down their throats unless they want them. If the rest of the Zune is as bad as this initial review of nothing more than the installation makes it out to be, you guys are doomed.