There’s a certain amount of cleverness in rotating the Zune image and, as far as I know, all that credit should go to MacDailyNews. Funny image aside it turns out that the Zune (no surprise here) isn’t selling too well. What’s the prescription for a slow selling product? Price cuts and advertising. Not that price cuts and advertising will work, just that that is what you try to do if you’re falling farther and farther behind in the mp3 player marketplace.

The reality is that Microsoft is trying to make an iPod killer when the iPod is already dead. The iPhone stands over the bloody corpse of the iPod like some weird Viking on a Molly Hatchet album cover. So Microsoft is trying to beat something already beaten with price cuts and advertising. That is like trying to beat papyrus with cave wall writing when APple has already come out with the printing press. To put it another way: Microsoft is being reactive in an already dead market.

But, sure, Microsoft could come out with an iPhone killer. Microsoft could make Windows mobile compelling. But they won’t. Microsoft will never lose the desktop war but it is doubtful that the company will wake up in time to realize that they are standing on the wrong battlefield.