Radio Australia Today Editorial

iPod or Zune. Barack Obama gets a pasting.

16 January 2009

He is not even the president of the United States yet, but Barack Obama has become embroiled in a scandal, one of those scandals that has the appendage “-gate” attached to it.

The scandal, which has been doing the rounds on tech-blogs, started when a tech writer alleged that he saw the in-coming president using a Zune!

The Zune, for those of you who are not aware of it, is Microsoft’s answer to the iPod. It’s a music player that is a direct competitor to Apple’s pod family, although sales figures suggest that the race is pretty one-sided. Zune has less than ten percent of the market, while the iPods have more than sixty.

The thing that interested me in the Obama story is the shock and horror that seemed to come out after the Obama revelation. A person, president or not, chooses a product that is not the number one seller, and it becomes a scandal (now called Zunegate).

Even more weird is the fact that Obama’s office issued a denial, insisting that the president-elect uses an iPod.

Now I’m sure that the denial was quite informal and not done with the intent of denigrating the Microsoft product, but the denial has continued the story. The man who first said he saw Obama in a gym using a Zune, retorted to the denial, insisting that Obama was using a Zune. Sorta. He says ” It had a dark case protecting it and from what I saw, he was using a Zune.”

“From what I saw”. Doesn’t sound definitive to me.

But who cares if the president-elect is using a Zune, iPod or cassette player?

No-one but for a few Zunesters and iPodders. That is, until the denial was issued.

Let’s hope this is a lesson to the new adminsteration. Peoples’ jobs could be at risk by such silly carryings-on. Zune is having trouble getting real traction in the marketplace. Being so obviously labelled as uncool isn’t going to help.

And at the end of all this mess, it is just another way of playing the same music. So chill out dudes.

                                                                        – Phil