Microsoft shares more of its Zune vision with Wall Street analysts. Entertainment and devices chief Robbie Bach warns not to expect music-player or Xbox profitability for another year or two.

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Zune, Microsoft's upcoming digital media device, will not contribute to the software maker's bottom line for several years, top executives told financial analysts. The company predicts that it will take up to five years of investment before the Zune product line will pay off.

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Microsoft's planned music player, Zune, will incur losses for at least the first five years of production, according to Microsoft executives. Development costs are expected to be in the hundreds of millions of dollars.

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Microsoft has been in the news lately, first with intense speculation about their music strategy, then with confirmation of "Zune." Continuing their strategy of domination headlines, Microsoft has continued to dole out tidbits of news, but some of the attention is unwanted. The latest news comes from yesterday's second-quarter earnings conference calls with investors. Robbie Bach,

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Microsoft acknowledges Zune is years late to the party and plans to spend years investing in the project - but it'll be available this fall.

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A financial analysts' meeting held by Microsoft this week made it clear that the newly announced Zune music player (see our coverage ) is not a short term project.

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Re-uses Xbox business model Microsoft has pledged to spend "hundreds of millions" of dollars establishing its Zune music hardware and services combo while losing money on the package for the next few years. It'll take the company 3-5 years to make a significant impact to the market, it reckons.…

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Microsoft does not expect to see a return on its upcoming Zune portable media device for several years, according to a top executive at the company.

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ROBBIE BACH President, of the newly formed 'Entertainment and Devices Division' at Microsoft has spoken to analysts about the new Zune media player at the most recent Microsoft annual financial meeting.

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NOW this could get interesting. Microsoft have had enough with the web rumours about their potential iPod killer and have come clean. The Zune portable music player will let people share and sample tracks via wi-fi.

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