Microsoft Zune

The Zune 30 launched on November 14, 2006 — five years after the first iPod, into a market Apple already owned. Microsoft's player packed a 30-gigabyte hard drive, an FM radio, and a 3-inch screen, but the things people remembered were the squat body and the color options: black, white, and a much-discussed brown that instantly became shorthand for the whole doomed enterprise. Launch week went respectably — roughly 9% of unit sales, a distant second to the iPod's 63% — and it was downhill from there.

The irony is that the Zune's weirdest ideas were the future arriving early. Its marquee feature was wireless sharing — "squirting" a song to a nearby Zune owner, who could play it three times over three days before the DRM took it back. The restriction made the feature a joke (and finding a second Zune owner made it a thought experiment), but it was peer-to-peer music sharing on a mainstream device in 2006. Zune Pass went further: a monthly subscription for unlimited music downloads, later sweetened with ten permanent tracks a month — a streaming-era business model shipped to an audience that wasn't ready for it yet.

The hardware got genuinely good right as the world stopped caring. The 2009 Zune HD was a sleek OLED touchscreen player whose interface — big typography, sideways-scrolling panes, content over chrome — was widely admired even by people who mocked the brand, and it directly inspired the Metro design language of Windows Phone 7. It wasn't enough: by 2009 Zune's share of the market was around 2% against Apple's 73%. Microsoft discontinued Zune hardware in October 2011, and the Zune services were folded into Xbox Music in 2012.

Then came the strange afterlife. The Zune outlived its punchline status to become a genuine cult object — an eBay collectible and the patron gadget of everyone who ever backed the wrong format. Its epitaph is the kindest thing you can say about a failed product: it was wrong about nothing except when, and whom, and versus what.