[Windows Phone 7 General] N8ter:
Your folder cannot be 500MB unless you did something to make it take up that much space, like dropping large files into that directory.

Zune takes much < 100MB space. I have it installed on 3 computers and a laptop in front of me. It doesn't take up 500MB space. Nothing you say or do will change that.

Zune includes support for CODECs that Windows Media Player doesn't support.

It's not hard to inbuild Video Playing and Photo Viewing functionality into third party applications on Windows seeing as how much of the in-built functionality of the OS is componentized (i.e. 3rd party browsers putting a different shell on the IE browser control or WMP ActiveX control, etc.).

Having to launch several discrete applicatiosn is a pain in the ass for users. When you're browsing your Library on your ZuneHD or Windows 7 Phone, you don't want it launching separate applications for Market Access, Video Playback, Music Playback, or Photo Viewing. You can complain all you want, but it packs a huge punch in its size.

iPhone users do not complain about QuickTime and iTunes duplicating functionality, and they take up about 3x the space of Zune and even have several services running in the background (and hijack file associations). Complaining about Zune given the alternatives is just petty, IMO.

Rhapsody's client duplicates just as much functionality, is required for their subscription service, and is almost as big as Zune. It actually has less functionality than Zune.

All the decent Music/Video stores will not allow Microsoft to blatantly integrate their service with Windows Media Player. They want you to download their software to access their services (like the examples above, Rhapsody, Apple, even Spotify has their own client, among others). Otherwise, they lose control of everything except the subscription itself.

The only exception of the "biggies" tends to be Amazon, but they aren't a subscription service (and are trying to compete with iTunes). Still, they require you to download their own special downloader application to get their music, when they could easily have integrated with WMP via Web Services.

WMP is a general media player application.

Comparing WMP with Zune is like Comparing QuickTime with iTunes.

There's a reason why both exist on both Windows (WMP+Zune) and Apple (QT+iTunes) platforms.

Of course they do. I don't expect anyone to agree with me. I do, however, expect them to read my posts and interpret them without going out of the way to make it seem like they mean something completely different than they do - which seems to be the order of the day in these forums.

Microsoft cannot just drop support for legacy platforms.

A company cannot just outright ditch a platform or product overnight. That's not the way it works. They have contracts/partners and businesses that rely on those products. Support has to be ramped down, not cut off immediately.

That's why they still support Windows XP, even though it's almost a decade old and two versions behind Windows 7.

Ayone who would expect Microsoft, Apple -who still supported PowerPCs for a while after moving to Intel architecture- or any large corporation to just cut users/businesses/business users off that way is just ignorant, and have no clue how these things work in the real world.