Not being one to bash the steady stream of mediocre late-to-market poorly executed products but the really the Zune characterizes the poor state of Microsoft product management. It is a good example of how when you have some money you can screw it up and when you have a lot of money you can really screw it up. Apple’s new iPod range shows just how far behind Microsoft is competing in the portable music player market. Seth Jayson puts it this way:

Obviously, Microsoft’s Zune Czar, J Allard, is presiding over a miserable failure of a device. (I say that as the resident of a two-Zune household.) Not only is the Zune hardware completely outclassed by the new generation of iPods, but Apple has also leapfrogged Microsoft by including a Wi-Fi chip in the iPod touch, and — get this — actually making it useful.

Now Motley Fool is not exactly your open source liberal leaning pinko open-source using crowd, they have held MSFT in their portfolio for a long time, but they have essentially given seeing anything close to innovation from anywhere inside the Microsoft monolith.

They like others on Wall Street are calling for Microsoft to be broken up so that it at least has a chance of competing with smaller more focused competitors.

Other than their core business of monopoly pricing structures for Windows and Office, they have failed to break into any other market. All of the so called “new technologies” such as MSN Windows Live, and the myriad of home devices have failed to garnish any market share without placing the product on cash life support.

The Zune is a symptom of the entrenched myopia that Microsoft has inside it’s walls. It is time for a change in the way Microsoft does business before the inevitable erosion in even it’s core base of products.