According to Gizmodo an unnamed high ranking Microsoft employee told a third party, “if you like the Zune, you’ll love us on June 1st”. Rumors abound regarding a Flash memory-based Zune coming June 1st. Can anyone say “Version 2.0”? Before we get all excited about the Microsoft’s next event for the Zune social let’s take a look at one of the funniest reviews of version 1.0 by mild mannered tech-journalist Leo Laporte:

A couple months after the airing of the above review, Leo Laporte and host, Paul Thurrot, had a Zune engineer,David Caulton, come talk on his podcast, Windows Weekly (#17). Needless to say, Leo toned it down quite a bit. The one thing that came out of the interview was that the Zune team came up with a great piece of hardware in less than a year. Then, of course, the suits hosed it up with DRM, incompatibilities and poor user-interface restrictions before foisting it on the rest of us. Will all of this get fixed in version 2.0? Well, the Zune would have clearly beaten the iPod… the 1st Gen iPod circa 2002. My guess is that Zune version 2.0 will beat 3rd Gen iPod (the one with the four small buttons above the click wheel) circa 2003. So with the impending introduction of Zune version 2.0 all we have to do with wait for version 3.0 for Microsoft to get it right. Of course by then either listening to music will be illegal or we’ll have subcutaneous media devices planted in our heads. JBB

What if Microsoft had designed the original iPod…