I just knew there was a reason I liked Costco! The finally figured out a way to put the Zune to good use! From MacDailyNews

As previously posted back on February 26th about the hilarious video about what the packaging of the iPod would look like if Microsoft marketed the product comes a welcome update to that story.

Microsoft Confirms it Originated iPod Box Parody Video

From Scoble:

Yes, we can laugh at ourselves. The marketing team did it to challenge the box designers for our products to do better. We need more of this stuff. Microsoft is a consensus culture and consensus (which means everyone has to sign off on things) does avoid trouble, but it also makes for uninspired products and marketing. That is our internal challenge to figure out, that’s for sure!

I say, fantastic! That was really well done and it’s good to know that Microsoft can still have a part of itself that is capable of poking fun and having a good laugh at its own expense. The thing that makes the video so good is that its entire true but that was kind of the point all along. Anyway, it was cool to see that this classic video in fact originated from Redmond but the really funny part will be to watch the marketing of their upcoming products and see if they actually paid attention to the message in the video.

From the New York Times

When Samsung, the consumer electronics giant, decided to mount a serious challenge to Apple Computer’s iPod music player early last year, it turned to a little-known Silicon Valley software start-up with a cluttered one-room office tucked away here in a building above a mortgage title company.

The result of that partnership is Samsung’s newest Z5 portable MP3 player, which will appear on store shelves March 5. The software inside the player was forged at Iventor Inc. by a small team of programmers led by Paul Mercer, 38, a veteran Apple Macintosh software designer.

Samsung’s decision to hire Mr. Mercer is significant because Apple, in designing the original iPod four years ago, turned to Pixo Inc., the company Mr. Mercer founded after he left Apple in 1994 to create software for hand-held devices.

Apple used Pixo software to create the music player’s simple interface, and Pixo’s name appeared in the credits of the original iPod MP3 player. Sun Microsystems acquired Pixo in 2003.

For Mr. Mercer, the Samsung project is the culmination of more than two decades of focus on extending personal computer technologies to the realm of portable devices.