You may have seen some buzz in the news and online over the last few days about the availability of Zune 80 - so I talked to the product management and retail teams to get the story. Here’s what I found out: Based on our own forecasts as well as early retail orders, we chose to prioritize production of the Zune 4 and Zune 8. Zune 80 was at retail on launch day albeit in lower numbers. That combined with the positive press cycle and higher-than-expected demand has led to the current situation - but...

Some of you may have already heard, but tomorrow we’re dropping the suggested retail price for Zune to $199. It’s part of the normal product lifecycle, something we’ve had on the books for months. We just got some research back and customer satisfaction with the 30GB device is really high (around 94%) and we expect even more consumers will now want to discover the Zune experience at the new lower price. Hope everybody had a great long weekend!

Today on the earnings call, Microsoft announced that Zune has achieved our goal of one million units sold in, as well as Microsoft earning over $50 billion in annual revenue . We actually went above and beyond our goal: we sold 1.2 million units. John in S. Florida points this out , too.

As of June 10, the Red Zune is available online at Amazon.com . The Zune retail team tells me that the Red Zune is on order at Target. Depending on delivery times from Target’s distribution center, you should see the Red Zune in Target stores soon, in the coming weeks, as I noted before . It’s cool to see the community get excited for Red! Edit, Friday 10:07 AM: Added the red background image, by request.