So, the new touchscreen Zune is on its way, which Microsoft believes is going to give Apple’s iPod touch a serious kicking. Aside from the fact that the new Zune looks a little too much like a lighter, I’m still confused regarding Microsoft’s strategy for this product.

On the face of it, the Zune has a lot going for it: strong media support, a decent screen, HD out, WiFi, a built-in HD radio tuner. But many reports suggest it’s still going to be a US-only product, which seems absolutely bonkers if true—after all, I’m pretty sure Apple sells one or two iPods in Europe, Australia, Japan and elsewhere around the globe. (Some rumours contradict this, suggesting Microsoft is planning to release the new Zune in a ‘limited number of European markets’.)

Mostly, though, this appears like the perfect product to kill off the iPod, rather than the iPod touch. This is the device Microsoft should have released before September 2007, not some time in 2009. The reason: objectively speaking, OS X devices aren’t about the hardware—they’re about what you can do with the device. Microsoft can crow all it likes about HD output (especially given that the device’s storage will be filled rather rapidly if you add a load of HD content) and a radio receiver, but until the company has something that can stand shoulder-to-shoulder with the App Store, Zune will be yet another also-ran.

On Daring Fireball this morning, there was a link to Matt Asay’s CNET feature Google and Apple should join the Firefox party, which in a nutshell suggests Google and Apple should ditch WebKit and instead ‘invest in Firefox’. As someone immersed in the web design industry for much of my life, whether it’s in designing sites or writing about the process of designing sites, Asay’s suggestion made my head spin. Here are some reasons why he’s wrong:

Consolidation reduces software innovation

We see this everywhere, and notably in the creative industry. When Adobe bought Macromedia, it removed the bulk of its competition. Since then, it’s grown fat and lazy. This would likely happen if it was IE vs Frankenstein’s Monster Firefox.

All the competition has rising market share

Asay’s main argument for consolidation is that it’d smack Microsoft hard. He claims splintering efforts is less effective than a solidified counter attack. That must be news to Safari, Chrome, Opera and Firefox, each of which continues to chip away at Microsoft’s lead. Sure, it’s a slow process, but it is steady, and I haven’t seen too many ‘IE market share rises by five per cent’ headlines of late.

WebKit is often superior to Gecko

Firefox and its Gecko engine might be the runner-up to IE, but WebKit is smaller, sleeker and more efficient. If Apple knifed Safari, the Gecko equivalent would be more bloated and unsuitable for iPhone.

Ownership enables optimisation for own services

Google didn’t make a browser because they thought it’d be a fun jape—Chrome exists to be a solid runtime environment for Google’s online apps. Similarly, Safari is a browser but its core is a major component of Mac OS X and iPhone, accessible to developers. Ditching these components would be a crazy decision by either company, just to try and batter Microsoft’s market lead in an area that Apple and Google are only superficially interested in anyway.

IE’s competition is compliant and fast to react

The main concern from a design industry standpoint is standards compliance. When building a typical website, you can be reasonably sure that whatever you do will work fine in Safari, Firefox, Chrome and Google. It’s IE that’s the problem.

Asay argues that “common investment in Firefox […] would leave the industry better off”, but I’d say precisely the opposite is true. It would shackle Google and Apple’s development, leave Opera out in the cold (unless they too threw in their lot with Firefox, thereby obliterating their entire organisation in a single moment of madness), and provide no benefits to the end user.

That all said, there is one argument I’ll make for consolidation: I’d like to see IE9 bin the Trident engine and Microsoft base its browser around Gecko, WebKit or Presto. That way, IE’s odd quirks would be consigned to history, we’d have three competing but excellent rendering engines, and Microsoft could get on with providing a decent Windows-like interface for its users to access the web with. And for all those sites that would explode should that happen, just retain the irksome ‘compatibility mode’ for a couple of versions of IE, but make it a literal ‘engine switch’ to the last version of Trident.

I run an iPhone reviews website called iPhoneTiny, driven by a Twitter feed, and I also write for various iPhone and Mac publications. This means I see a lot of iPhone apps and games, and regularly cull dozens of the things from my iPhone, to set up the next ‘batch’ of reviews.

The upside is that I’m convinced iPhone is a fantastic platform for all manner of things that people would never have believed just a short while ago. Apps like Bento and Things are great from a productivity standpoint, and myriad excellent games have significantly changed my viewpoint since writing Why iPod touch will never be a major gaming platform for Cult of Mac.

The downside—aside from a continual stream of press releases that direct me to an app’s store page rather than promo codes—is that iPhone has created a consumer group that has absolutely no understanding regarding value for money.

One of the first apps I bought for iPhone was Dropship. The game is essentially an update of Thrust, a 1986 arcade game from Firebird that itself riffed off the wonderful Gravitar coin-op. Dropship improves on the classic 8-bit release with dual-thumb controls, beautiful graphics and downloadable levels. More surprising was the price—I bought the app for £1.19. To put that in perspective, that’s 80p less than Thrust cost on cassette tape for the C64, way back in 1986.

Unlike other people, my problem isn’t so much that App Store titles are so cheap, but the fact buyers don’t seem to understand the sheer value of the items on offer. Recently rummaging around the US store, I found reviews for Power Toppler, a remake of C64 cult classic Nebulus. Like the original, the game is absurdly difficult, but it’s fairly good and worth persevering with, and at £1.19 (or $1.99 on the US store), I’d say that’s pretty good value—especially when you consider that’s roughly a third of the cost of the original Nebulus on Wii Virtual Console. Sadly, a recent review on the App Store stated that the game wasn’t worth two bucks.

iPhone owners need to take a step back and understand what they’re getting. Sure, some games are cheap and simple, but even they can be fantastic value. Witness Flight Control, which cost me just 59p, and yet provided more game time than about half the DS games I’ve bought over the past few years—and for considerably more than 59p. However, when you look at the likes of Frenzic (effectively iPhone’s Tetris, but just £1.79) and Eliss (a beautiful and unique touchscreen puzzler that sells for £1.79, but that would fetch £15+ if a DS version was possible), it’s clear too many iPhone owners are looking a gift horse in the mouth and then gobbing in it.

All the recent excitement about The Pirate Bay dragged uncomfortable arguments to the fore. Yes, The Pirate Bay was rather flagrant about its enabling access to copyrighted material. But when it boils down to it, The Pirate Bay is merely a search service for finding torrents—torrents that can also be legal, such as videogame demo downloads.

A whole bunch of people noted that The Pirate Bay was being singled out, in an attempt to provide a high-profile casualty and scare similar sites into shutting down. But much larger sites also provide access to torrents, notably Google (via a ‘filetype:torrent’ query).

The logical upshot of this was The Pirate Google, available from thepirategoogle.com. This site merely provides a front-end to a torrent-specific Google search, in the same way thousands of other sites provide access to Google Custom Search. The point is to show that Google’s functionality isn’t, in some cases, a million miles away from The Pirate Bay’s.

Google, apparently, thought differently. At the time of writing, Google’s blocked access to The Pirate Google. I’ll bet the official reasoning is down to the site’s name, in suggesting there’s some link between ‘piracy’ (bootlegging) and Google. It’ll be interesting to see if Google does the same if someone decides to create an identical site with a less controversial name.

Microsoft’s latest advertising campaign is a slightly odd one in many ways—it thrusts dollars into the hands of normal people (well, actors acting out the role of normal people) and gets them to buy a new computer. Obviously, they look at Macs, spit on them and grab a PC. At the same time, Microsoft continues to crow about the so-called ‘Apple Tax’.

Aside from the obvious danger in an advertising campaign that puts forward the argument that the only benefit your product has is price, the Apple Tax argument is one that holds little water when explored fully. Unfortunately, it’s often hard to put into words a succinct argument why the Mac side is typically better, and therefore why someone can justify spending more on what many people initially see as the same thing—‘just a computer’. Phrases like “it’s just better” and “you won’t get it until you try it” only work when someone has tried it and then tries to convince someone else to ‘cross over’ at a later date.

One of the better attempts of recent times arrived yesterday, courtesy of Harry McCracken in his article Eight Reasons Your Next Computer Should Be a Mac. He says: “Next time I encounter a Microsoft executive tsk-tsking about the onerous ‘Apple Tax’ imposed by a Mac’s needless glitz, I’m tempted to ask him what car he drives—and whether he chose the model with the cloth seats and hand-cranked windows, or one with a few creature comforts.”

The thing is, even this argument often falls on deaf ears, which makes me ask the following question: why are computers still considered dreary, strictly functional devices to so many people? When consumers have the money, they want a flash car with nice stuff, a decent mobile phone with bells and whistles, a good-looking television, and a sparkly watch. They don’t want the near-junked car with manual windows, the mobile phone that barely manages to make text messages, a TV from the dark ages, and a 1980s Casio digital watch.

With computers and the internet becoming near ubiquitous in so many people’s lives, it’s strange that so many people, as Stephen Fry put it when I interviewed him, “spend their lives in front of a screen […] in a Windows environment, the equivalent of a ‘sick building syndrome’ office, with strip lighting, ugly furniture and no freshness, sexiness or imagination in design. People are dragging out their lives in the computer equivalent of a sink estate and no-one questions it.”

I regularly question it, but I still haven’t found any answers.