OK, so Microsoft launches the Zune officially tomorrow. News is starting to trickle out about just how screwed up the Zune concept really is.

I had already heard that Microsoft has agreed to pay Universal a fee for every player sold. Which is totally ludicrous. Why does Universal deserve a dime for the sale of a device that may never have Universal content on it?

Next in line is the fact that the DRM (Digital Rights Management, the technology that actually takes your rights away) that Microsoft has chosen to employ in the Zune eco-verse, is completely incompatible with prior versions of DRM that they’ve deployed in the past with Windows Media Player. Bought some tunes in the past thru Microsoft and want to play them on your brand new (ugly as sin) Zune? Out of luck. Buy it again.

And now we get to the one that will probably kill early adopters: Points. It appears as though when you go to the Zune store to purchase content, you don’t spend dollars, you buy points and then spend the points on the content. Not only does this completely obscure the actual price for the content you’re purchasing, but the math is set up in such a way that it’s very complicated to “zero” your account out. Which means either you’re going to leave money on the table (giving Microsoft more per content item than the price would indicate), or you’ll buy more and more points to be able to evenly spend everything in your account. Either way, you spend more money.

Couple all of that with the fact that the device is larger and uglier than an iPod and something tells me that this whole Zune thing is not going to catch on as fast as Microsoft thinks it will.