zunehd

According to Daring Fireball‘s John Gruber, Microsoft has been offering successful iPhone developers loads of cash just to port their popular iPhone apps over to the their new Zune HD platform.

I got an email from the developer of an iPhone Twitter client. He was contacted by Microsoft a few months ago, with an offer to port his app to the Zune in exchange for “a bucket of money”. He turned them down, but assumes, as I do, that Microsoft reached out to the developers of multiple popular iPhone apps.

Apparently if you can’t beat them, you should just try to buy them.

Microsoft is obviously trying really, really hard to ensure that their new Zune HD actually has a chance at competing with the iPod this time around.  The Zune HD is actually priced very competitively at $220 for a 16GB and $290 for a 32GB, plus it contains a bunch of features that even the iPod touch itself doesn’t have.  However, if the rumored early September Apple event takes place, and the rumors of a new iPod touch and iTunes 9 are true, everything should return back to normal.

It will be interesting to see just how many developers actually do take their buckets of money and head to the Zune with their apps.