Hasta La Gadget!

The bad news just won’t end for Microsoft’s Zune media player. After the rather inauspicious start to the New Year when thousands of Zunes froze due to a glitch in the software, comes the report that Zune platform revenue showed a 54% revenue decrease in the last quarter.

The $100 million revenue decline "reflects a decrease in device sales," said Microsoft in its quarterly filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.

But this is one thing that Microsoft will have trouble blaming on the economy. Earlier this week Apple said it sold 22.7 million iPods during the previous quarter, a three percent growth from the year before.

For years Zune has been an also-ran device lagging far, far behind the iPod. And incidents such as the Zune bug on New Year’s Eve that resulted from the  inability of the device clock to handle the extra day in a leap year that was 2008 hasn’t endeared it to users.

Now with its declining revenue Zune increasingly seems like a vanity play for Microsoft–unless it rolls it into the larger Xbox brand. Any bets on how long that will take?

Photo: Zune