Poor Microsoft. They just want to profit from every waking moment of our days, and we give them such a hard time about it.

Zune is Microsoft’s first venture into the MP3 player market, a beautifully Machiavellian betrayal of their former PlaysForSure partners. Young Cesar Mendez holds down the fort at the Zune Insider blog and tries to answer questions and respond to comments. I felt bad for him when the shitstorm rose up on his blog.

I have a feeling that shortly after the Zune is released, firmware hacks are going to spring up which will magically heal the player’s achilles heel. You see, Zune allows you to transfer music wirelessly from one Zune to another, but cripples the music with widely-hated Digital Rights Management wrappers. The DRM allows the newly transferred song to play three times, or expire in three days, whichever comes first.

Just like the first-gen XBox, the Zune could turn out to be a nifty device despite Microsoft’s intentions. The first generation of XBoxes weren’t anything compelling in their out-of-the-box configuration, but once the modders got into them it opened a Pandora’s box of awesomeness. Gigantic hard drives, the ability to copy games, the ability to play old Atari and Nintendo games, it’s all there. Indeed, with a firmware hack the Zune could also be an interesting device, then once market share is achieved the second generation will put the screws to the users. This is what I’m predicting, with the caveat that it could just tank like MS Bob.

Update: Read a great comparison of the two MP3 players.