Today Microsoft released financial figures for the fiscal year ended June 30th. Notably, they announced that annual revenue has surpassed $51 billion. As you can imagine, that gigantic figure is attracting lots of attention, meaning that this announcement from Microsoft’s Cesar Menendez has been somewhat hidden:

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.

That’s good news for the Zune team! In the comments on that post, Brian points out that Zune’s sales are probably lower than iPod’s in the first year, though it is difficult to compare (given the differences in the size of the market).

Time for a new goal Zune team!

According the folks at ZuneScene, Microsoft is hard at work on the next generation hard drive Zune code-named “Scorpio” which itself is the big brother of “Draco,” a flash-based device. From a “source inside the hallowed halls of Microsoft”:

The source indicated the storage capacity is 80GB for Scorpio. We challenged that and asked if he was sure there would be no 100 or 120 GB Zune. The answer was blunt: “No, it will be 80″. Perhaps the most exciting news is that mass production of Scorpio will begin at the very end of July.

The timeline for launch is thus the 2007 holidays.

Bottom line - if you’ve been holding out for a revision to the Zune, it sounds like you won’t have to wait much longer!

I think the Zune is a very good first entry into the market for Microsoft, but there’s no way I’d be tattooing the Zune logo on my body, let alone more than once! Yet someone did. You’ve probably heard about “mszunefan” by now - here he is with his two tattoos:

It turns out that getting those tattoos was a good investment! According to Engadget, Microsoft has decided to fly its biggest Zune fan out to Redmond to meet the Zune team! He’ll also do an interview for Microsoft’s Channel 10.

If I were mszunefan I’d be thinking “who’s laughing now?” Heheh…well done sir.

Will the second-generation Zune get a boost in storage space? A bigger hard drive is probably a good bet anyway, but this news from Samsung sort of makes it more likely:

Featuring the highest available capacity in the 1.8” form factor (120GB) and fastest speed (4200rpm) for notebook performance, Samsung’s N2 Series drives usher in a new era of advanced capability and enhanced reliability.

The new drives will fit in a Zune and share the same connection type as current drives, according to Zune-Online.com.

Bring on the larger capacity Zunes!