Microsoft Zune Blindsided by Leap Year

Do you have a Microsoft Zune? It is a solid competitor in the music player market, but it fares about as well against Apple in the music player arena as Apple fares against Microsoft in the PC market. It has a niche following, but barely makes a dent in the iPod phenomenon.

I have a Zune though. I tend to be Microsoft-centric. I had an 8Gb Zune. I liked it so I bought a 30Gb to store all of my music (then found out I really have about 35Gb worth and had to cut out the holiday tunes and such to make it fit) and gave the 8Gb Zune to my son. Admittedly though, I recently became an iPhone convert and, although my 8Gb iPhone can not nearly hold my music collection, I like the simplicity of just the one device so I had not used my Zune for a few months.

Then I woke up on New Year's Eve Day to find that the world was abuzz because apparently every 30Gb Zune in the world locked up simultaneously and became completely useless and unresponsive. I fired mine up. Lo and behold it was true. Many speculated it was a Y2K9 bug....only it wasn't 2009 yet so that speculation seemed flawed. A peer of mine noted that it was the 366th day of the year since 2008 was a Leap Year. He joked that 'the Zune promises to provide for your music needs 24/7/365, but nobody said anything about day 366."

Turns out he was right. The root cause of the issue was a flaw in the 30Gb Zune programming that didn't know what to do for a day 366. Microsoft is working on an actual fix, but all of the Zunes resumed normal operation already once the calendar flipped to January 1, 2009- a day that the Zune is programmed to recognize. So, it turned out not to be a malware compromise or insidious plot to attack the world by stealing their music (but only from the sub-segment of the Zune niche that specifically uses the 30Gb model). Crisis averted.