A glimmer of hope for Dell?

So about a week ago, BusinessWeek wrote a piece that talks about Dell’s ambitious plans to take on iTunes with its new Zing software. Basically, I guess, the logic is that armed with former Apple employee Tim Bucher (who sued the company for wrongful termination and later settled) can help Dell beat Apple at their own game. Or something.

While our own Dan Moren and BusinessWeek’s own readers pretty much think that this is the highway to Crazytown, B-Dub’s Peter Burrows adds a few extra notes:

But I still say Dell is worth watching—if only because it’s at least trying a new approach to create viable competition for Apple. Ever since the “Plays For Sure” initiative died the death it richly deserved and Microsoft turned to the more closed Zune approach, there has been no center of gravity to pull together the fragmented efforts taking place outside of Cupertino. Most digital media fans have an iPod, so can’t use most of the other commercial services that compete with iTunes. And people who have spent meaningful money at the iTunes store are unlikely to try out other devices. I am not saying Apple is anti-competitive or evil. But let’s face it: it’s hard to see how any company by its lonesome can overcome the dominant position Apple has established, at least in digital music.

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We didn’t have room in the magazine story for a lot of my reporting on Dell’s plans, but given the interest in the topic I thought I’d share more details. The basic idea behind Zing is to un-bundle digital content so it’s not linked to a given device or service. That way, the song or other file could flow where the consumer wants it to, says Zing founder Tim Bucher, who remains at Dell a year after the PC maker purchased the start-up a year ago. If you like Pandora and I like Slacker (or you like Rhapsody and I like Sirius, for another example), we could still “zing” songs to each other and listen to them using the service we prefer. Also, Bucher’s goal is to have the content automatically synch to all of your net-connected devices. So if I receive a song recommendation or podcast on my PC during work, I wouldn’t have to move it to my smart-phone to listen to on the commute home. “I want my content to follow me everywhere,” says Bucher. “Forget the sync and dink and blink stuff” of manually managing digital media files.

But then, of course, he appends the entire piece with this gem: I’m not saying Bucher’s odds are great. But they are at least a tad better than they appear.

Um, right. Whatever you say, boss.