You'd have to be living under a rock not to know that Microsoft is in the midst of two big product launches - the Zune MP3 player and the Windows Vista operating system. Apparently the programmers behind Vista and Zune have been living under their respective rocks - because the Zune is incompatible with Vista, longtime Microsoft watcher Mary Jo Foley reports. Talk about the left hand not knowing what the right hand is coding.

Scott Erickson, a senior director for product management at Microsoft, told News.com that the company hopes to have the Zune compatible with Vista by the end of the month, when Vista's business edition becomes available. If they miss that date, he expects a Vista-compatible version of Zune's software by January 30, when the consumer edition of Vista rolls out.

What happened here? Blame the ongoing delays with Vista, which was only released to manufacturing - a key, final step - last week. That's hardly enough time for the Zune coders to test and update their software against the final version of Vista. Still, you'd think that Microsoft could have gotten more cooperation going between its platforms and entertainment divisions to have Zune be Vista-compatible from the get-go. It's hard to imagine Apple, even though it divided itself into iPod and Mac divisions more than two years ago, not coordinating software updates between the iPod, iTunes, and Mac OS X.