Best. Ship Gift. Ever.

It's a tradition with most major product releases that there's a ship gift for the product team and a select group of key partners involved in designing, developing, testing and shipping the product. Jon Avner recently blogged about past ship gifts for Exchange on EHLO

For Exchange 2007 RTM, we got zunes. The best part? They're E2k7 branded:

It took me a little while to get used to the interface on the device (and even more time to get used to the interface on my desktop - I'm used to it now but I still find it cumbersome, especially when searching for music to buy online) but I'm pretty hooked now.

I have a series of videos on it (home videos of the kids as well as music videos for some of my favorite songs, plus some of my favorite videos grabbed from youtube like Lazy Sunday) too which I make pretty heavy use of.

My husband works in Exchange too, so we both have them and played around with beaming songs to each other, which is pretty neat - before I owned one, I wasn't terribly jazzed about that feature but now that I've seen how slick it is, I really think it is incredibly innovative and has potential to change the way we all handle music and find new bands. Long term, I'd like to see that functionality in every device that can play music or video. Of course before it's really widely adopted, I think it'll need to change...support beaming of videos, and don't time-out songs after X plays if the songs aren't already DRM protected.

For example, over lunch the other day a coworker was telling me about Daft Punk... I couldn't remember any of their songs, so later in the day he sent me to some music videos of theirs on youtube. It would have been handy if he could have just beamed me a couple of sample songs so I could see what he was talking about (and I really don't want to put other people's ear buds into my ears, wax-city :-).