Bill Gates confirmed one of my suspicions today about the Zune: It is following the same route the Xbox did in development.

"Zune is very analogous to Xbox One," he said. "That is, a very innovative product with some identifiable features that move the category forward: The larger screen, the WiFi capabilities, sending music around."

"Even more than Xbox, we can upgrade a lot of things we are going to do in the future. For example, we could let you buy music right there on the device. And there are a ton of more things we can do because it is software driven and has a fair bit of capacity." Brian Crecente

Contact information for this author is not available.