Reuters has recently reported that the Zune, Microsoft’s media player which launched in the US in November, could be launching for European customers before the end of 2007 but Microsoft is not ready to make the announcement official quite yet.

According to Jason Reindorp, Zune marketing director at Microsoft, they understand the competition they are up against with the Apple iPod, and ready to face the challenges. “You couldn’t get a more entrenched competitor,” he said at the annual music industry Midem Net conference in France. “But we feel really good about the first steps that we’ve taken.”

The Zune from Microsoft is a 30 GB digital media player that features some wireless functionality to share pictures, music, and video between devices, as well as a built in FM-tuner.

“The industry moves in this sort of Christmas to Christmas cycle. So you can expect that there will be more devices, more features in the market at that point,” he said. “Our next round of introductions will probably be in time for the holiday of this year.”

Reindorp went on to say that Microsoft has some research planned with focus groups in Europe to make potential modifications to the Zune to tailor to that market. According to Reindorp this move to Europe is part of a three year plan to get the Zone “on the radar”, from its current 10.2 percent market share in the US 30GB category.