Zune Thoughts: Rumour: Zune Coming to Canada in Spring 2008?

When I first started looking at the new Zune devices, when I noticed French as a supported language, my first thought was "Hmm. Canada next?". I said as much in this post. Something interesting happened over on YouTube: a user by the name of Pete Carels posted a comment attached to one of my videos saying that the Zune "will be coming to Canada, most likely in the spring". That seemed quite matter-of-fact, so I asked him what his source was. He claimed he worked for Microsoft and he had "close knowledge that this will be the plan for [the] Zune in the new year.". A screen shot of the YouTube comment thread is below.



Ok, you might be saying, so some guy named Pete Carels claims he works for Microsoft has has the inside scoop. People say things online all the time right? Well, I called the Microsoft switchboard in Redmond, Washington, and it happens to have a very sophisticated voice-recognition program (it can handle my linguistic slaughtering of the last name "Kumaramangalam" for instance) where you just need to say the name of any Microsoft employee and it will connect you to them - after it has confirmed that there is a matching employee name. Guess what? There's one, and only one, employee named Pete Carels working at Microsoft.

Coincidence? Perhaps. But unless this is an elaborate hoax, I think there really is a guy named Pete Carels working for Microsoft, and I think the Zune coming to Canada in the spring of next year makes a lot of sense given the evidence I've seen so far. Now why Pete would decide to release this information in a public YouTube thread under his own name is another mystery entirely...

If 2008 is the year the Zune starts to go international, I suspect we'll see a release in the UK next. Then...the world! Well, eventually. ;-)