Quotable moments: CNN says Zune is “clunky”

Oh, Zune. Why must you be so amusingly ridiculous? The New York Times’s Andrew Ross Sorkin popped over to CNN’s American Morning (video link) to chat with hosts Soledad O’Brien and Miles O’Brien (not to be confused with Miles O’Brien) about our good buddy, the Zune.

The hosts are, for the most part, pretty unimpressed with the Zune’s offerings.

Soledad O’Brien: And you can email with it, right?
Sorkin: No email. It’s just trading songs.
Miles O’Brien: Can you pull songs off of a network if you have ‘em on a server somewhere?
Sorkin: No, it’s just Zune-to-Zune.

And, as Sorkin points out, if you’ve bought music from either iTunes or any of the prior Windows Media ventures (Napster, etc.), you’ll need to buy your music again (or, burn it to CD and re-rip it in a Zune-compatible format).

But what puts the nail in the Zune’s coffin? Soledad O’Brien pulls out her new second generation iPod shuffle, and all of them marvel at the device’s tininess and clip functionality. That’s right, Microsoft—you’ve been beaten by the latest in nineteenth-century technology: a spring clip. Any last words for MS from the O’Briens?

Sorkin: Microsoft in the end, I’m sure, will come out with something—I don’t know if it will be that pretty—but something…[O’Brien clips the shuffle to her lapel]…isn’t that neat? Oh my god.
…
Miles O’Brien [gesturing to the Zune]: Why don’t they get some decent design people to make things look better? It’s clunky, it’s clunky.

And then Sorkin looks like the kid who brought a popsicle-stick house to show-and-tell, only to have the next kid bring in a scale-replica of the Notre Dame cathedral made from actual cut stone. Yeah, that kid. Better luck next time, Andy.