Microsoft Building The Next Zune Software “Ground Up”

The Zune being available on the Xbox 360, Windows and being the sync software for Windows Phone 7, is quite an important piece to Microsoft’s three screens and a cloud strategy. Microsoft officials have repeatedly said that they consider Zune to be a platform and not just a PMP, which leads me to believe that the new Zune software will be revamped, possibly both back-end and front-end.

The Windows Entertainment Client team has made two job postings on Microsoft’s career site giving us some information on what Microsoft plans for the consumer digital experience. One of the two job postings is quite explicit in saying that the next generation “synchronization platform” is being done “ground up”. Here’s the job description:

The WEC Platform team is building a next generation synchronization platform from ground up to enable accessing and sharing media content across PC(s), mobile device, Xbox and cloud. We are actively partnering with multiple Microsoft groups to light up these scenarios in seamless manner.

The second job posting is a bit more specific about one of the feature-sets that Microsoft wants to improve:

The WEC Platform team is building a next generation data and metadata storage platform to provide backbone to our application. We are going to build reliable, resilient, performant, and scalable data store and data access layer. Amazingly rich and fast user experience as well as data driven features are not possible without this solid data tier and this position presents a unique opportunity to build this backbone.

Since the Zune is the common thread across the Windows Phone 7, Xbox 360 and the PC presenting media such as games, songs, videos in a more relevant manner is important, and that is what the second job posting talks about.