So I just received a survey e-mail from the Zune Product Team. Little did they know I wasn't a real customer but a reviewer. And as I've just finished reviewing a Zune, I was ripe with criticism (the review will be up in the next few days, right Kurtis?). And while it was painfully obvious that Microsoft was really just trying to see how well (or poorly) they've been marketing the Zune, the survey also appeared to be a score card for such services as the Zune Marketplace and the wire-less music sharing features. With questions like:

"What MP3 player comes to mind when you think of wire-less music sharing?"

Don't pat yourselves on the back too much there, guys.

So the bit that really annoyed me was that I spent the better part of 45 minutes filling this thing out. Nearly 50 pages of survey. Now granted since I review MP3 players it's a fair bet that I'm more familiar with the various product lines than the average Zune purchaser. As such I'm sure my responses probably fed additional fields into the survey server and resulted in a longer click session for yours truly. But at the end, after I had taken the time to fill the stinking thing out what do I get for my troubles? NOTHING...not even a thank you! No, "thanks for filling out our survey", "thank you for buying a Microsoft Product", not even a "good luck trying to sell that Zune on eBay" taunt. At the conclusion of the survey all that happened was a page redirect to the ZuneNet website. I'm glad I gave them low marks for customer service.