Firstly, apologies for the shortage of posts recently but I’ve been out of the country for the last three weeks. I spent the last week or so in Florida and loved every minute of it. While I was there I was taking a look in Best Buy at the MP3 players and considered replacing my old Zune with the new blue one. I was then reminded of problems I had a few months ago trying to get my current Zune repaired.
I bought the Zune 30Gb while I was in New York last summer and had no problems with it for the first few months. Then one morning I plugged it into charge and nothing happened. I tried resets and everything with no luck so I eventually decided to give Microsoft a ring. Now bare in mind that I live outside the US and the Zune isn’t supported here but also remember that you’re talking about an MP3 player with a 3% market share and a company with a base in Ireland. So I gave them a ring and after a few minutes of describing and re-describing the issue to a support rep he told me that the Zune needed fixed and I could post it from my home. However they won’t post it back. They’ll happily fix it as it’s still in warranty but I have to get a US postal address in order to get it it back. I was even willing to pay postage on it but they were having none of it. This leaves me with a $200+ paper weight!
So this brings me back to last week and Best Buy. If I had picked up the nice shiny Zune and it had failed me, again, I wasn’t going to get any help from Redmond. So why should I bother? Well I didn’t. The Zune remained on the Best Buy shelf with so many others and I walked out with a Nintendo DS instead. While I understand what “not supported” means it would be a nice gesture if Microsoft could give the supporters of their device some sort of help when they’re outside the US. After all if they had been able to help a few months ago they would’ve gained an extra sale they now don’t have.
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