Archive for March, 2005

Six Warnings Not To Buy An iPod

March 26, 2005 @ 1:01 pm · Filed under Advertising, Microsoft, iPod/iTunes

Microsoft has posted a hilarious web page warning people not to buy iPods. The page can be summarized as:

  • But we won’t make any money and you’ll hurt our feelings if you buy an iPod like all your friends did…

Okay, so maybe it doesn’t say that, but it does say some equally foolish things:

  1. “Understand the basics”: here they claim that hard drive-based players skip when you jog. What a cheap shot; I may not be a jogger, but I’ve never heard my iPods skip in three years of use, and I’ve never heard anyone else complain about their iPods skipping, either
  2. “Make sure you’re getting all the goodies”: can’t say I’ve thought of high-quality headphones as extra “goodies”, and I like that I get to decide what accessories I want to pay for.
  3. “You’ll want a display”: well, I wanted a display, and my 20-GB iPod has a nice one. Lots of people don’t need a display, though, as demonstrated by the popularity of the iPod shuffle.
  4. “Let a professional make your next playlist”: translation; who are you to be choosing what you want to listen to? Listen to ads for car dealerships and sugar-water all day. Alternative translation; for God’s sake, don’t buy an iPod!
  5. “Pick the right size for you”: first they’re telling us how to choose an MP3 player, now it’s a Windows Media Audio device. Bet ya hardly noticed the bait-and-switch, there.
  6. “Don’t get locked into one online store”: Yeah, Microsoft has no history of customer lock-in, like with Windows, Office, Windows Media DRM. Most importantly remember — Microsoft’s proprietary is good, Apple’s proprietary is bad.

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Why The Switch?

March 24, 2005 @ 10:44 pm · Filed under Microsoft, Open-Source

Microsoft’s Robert Scoble has linked to an interesting account of why one organization has switched from a Windows-based web server environment to an open-source environment.

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Firefox Nipping at IE’s Heels

March 19, 2005 @ 1:17 pm · Filed under Browsers, Microsoft, Open-Source

Firefox, Internet ExplorerInformation Week is reporting (as others did last week) that Firefox is continuing to gain market share — primarily at the expense of Microsoft’s Internet Explorer.

While I don’t doubt the sincerity of Chris Wilson and the IE development team (see IEBlog), what I find disappointing is that Gates seems compelled to respond not to IE’s security-beleaguered users, and not to long-suffering web developers forced to work around its general bugginess, but to IE’s beleaguered market-share.

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Microsoft and Web Standards

March 18, 2005 @ 11:03 am · Filed under Browsers, Microsoft

MSIE iconI’ve complained in this space before that Microsoft’s “support” for web standards makes web developement more painful than it should be, and I’ve speculated that IE 7 may not help.

The IEBlog is changing my mind.

The proof of the pudding, though, is still in the eating, not in the blogging.

March 19 update: sources cited at eWeek.com suggest that Microsoft is not planning to improve CSS2 support as much as some of us might hope.

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Dollars for Dalton

March 2, 2005 @ 6:53 pm · Filed under Atlantic Canada

CBC.ca is reporting that the federal and Ontario governments are ploughing $435 Million into General Motors, $200 Million of which comes from Ottawa.

I don’t have a problem with this, but wasn’t Dalton McGuinty complaining recently about federal money coming to Atlantic Canada?

So remember; it’s charity or welfare if we’re talking about Atlantic Canada, but it’s an investment in jobs and infrastructure when it’s spent in Quebec or Ontario.

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