It looks like Microsoft has finally settled for a price on the Zune player, although they are probably not all that happy about it.

"We had to look at what was in the market and offer a competitive price," said Scott Erickson, Microsoft's senior director of product marketing for Zune. "We're not going to be profitable this holiday but the Zune project is a multiyear strategy."

Microsoft's 30-gigabyte Zune will retail for $249.99, which is incidentally the same price that Apple's iPod with the same capacity is priced. But this is not the work of coincidence, not by a long shot. Even when it was originally thought that the device would be shipping for $299, Microsoft would have been operating at a loss. The pricing of the new iPod served to increase that loss even further, the fact that they are not even trying to undercut the iPod's price is a clear indication of that.

But now, Microsoft faces another issue. It cannot compete with the iPod in terms of price, or mass appeal, or cool factor, so there are only the features left. And even though there are differences here, it has yet to be seen if they will make any difference. So far, the radio tuner has proven to be a negligible feature that holds no sway over the public. The wireless sharing might be a little more interesting, but for that to ever become a factor, it would require the Zune players to be ubiquitous, which they are not.