Paul Miller's Zune Pass comments were wrong.

Posted by Roku on April 7, 2012 05:58 pm 122

On the podcast Paul goes into a lengthy explanation about why he feels Zune Pass sucks compared to the competition by citing examples of features that have actually been a part of Zune before most other services (ie. Playback in the browser). Anyone who has ever visited Zune.net or even searched for a song on Bing knows that browser streaming functionality has been available for many years to Zune subscribers. But here is Paul criticizing MS for not having something they've had all along. Why does this keep happening on The Vergecast?

His criticisms about the Zune music catalog declining in comparison to the competition are also completely baseless. The catalog on Zune has grown from 2 million songs to over 14 million songs. That's the same number of songs as their competitors. Rhapsody is the #1 streaming service in America and they advertise the same number of songs (14 million). And despite being constantly talked about on the Vergecast, Rdio actually has far fewer songs than either Zune or Rhapsody (only 10 million).

When the guys on the podcast step in it like this all it does is confirm how little time and experience they actually have with Microsoft's products. It doesn't make them look credible at all to review these things. It's not that I dislike these people or think they have a hidden agenda against Microsoft. I just don't think they are familiar enough with the services that Microsoft has been offering. Some of that is Microsoft's fault because they haven't done a good enough job marketing their own products and services. But it's hard for me to take seriously the opinions of writers who week after week make false statements which only prove they haven't done their homework on this particular subject area.

I don't expect every tech blogger to know every piece of software & service back and forth, but these gaps for The Verge seem to consistently appear around Microsoft products. And when we're talking about products as widely used as Microsoft Office and Windows that can sometimes be pretty embarrassing. The whole Office web apps fiasco a couple months back was disgraceful. I think the Verge staff genuinely wants to be the best at tech coverage, but if you don't know that Microsoft has free versions of MS Office on the web then you are clearly not the best at this.

Josh keeps bragging about how he hired Tom Warren from Winrumors but the guy is never on the podcast when he needs to be and they don't even let him review the most important Microsoft products. It's nice that they hired Tom, but they're clearly not making use of his knowledge in their reviews and on their weekly podcast. It's to the site's own detriment to waste him.

The bias is one of familiarity.

Oh and by the way Windows Phone launched October 2010. It is not even 18-months old despite Josh claiming that it is 3 years old and that it debuted in 2009. Get the facts right please.