Asshole App Marketing
10/12/11 13:22
Okay, I’ve got the flu so I’m not going to bury the lead. I am sick and tired of the way some app creators are choosing to market their products. Unfortunately I fear that they are taking their cues from the cell phone industry who have done quite well with hidden fees and costs.
I recently downloaded an Atari game, an update of the classic asteroids I loved as a kid. The point of this game is to destroy asteroids and collect crystals which you can use to buy upgrades for your ship. Unfortunately this is not the only currency in the game. Space bucks which must be paid for with real money are required to advance through the game. You can use crystals to purchase them but at a rate of 100,000 crystals to ONE space buck. In order to achieve that you would have to play the first 50 waves 3 or 4 times. Ok so what’s my problem? Well you need at least 10 space bucks to do ANYTHING in the game past the first 50 waves. This would be fine if it were a scheme that allowed you to play the game for a while and then purchase it once you decided you like it but this is not the case. In order to unlock everything in the game you’d have to spend much more than the complete game is worth. You see they are hoping you get hooked and spend a little at a time until, before you realized it you’ve spent more money for the game than you would for an XBox 360 or Playstation 3 game, which has better graphics and when you buy it you get the WHOLE GAME. Well Atari I enjoyed the first 50 waves and then deleted the app. I would have payed for the full game and played through it all if you had the decency to simply sell it to me for a fair price.
Another game that employs this same marketing scheme is Contract Killer:Zombies. You get to a point early on where you can’t advance because you can’t earn the cash to purchase the weapons you need. What a waste of time. If you want to give me a demo which allows me to purchase the game if I enjoyed the demo, that’s cool. What you’ve done here is what I call Asshole App Marketing.
Having said that I am not against in-app purchases if done properly. Some times an app has a few different functions and so you pay for a basic set of functionality and then other functions are available if you want them but you don’t have to have them if you don’t need them. This is a smart and efficient use of in-app purchases. An example of this is TC Helicon’s VoiceJam. You can buy the lite version for 99 cents, and then upgrade to the full version. When you do you unlock a full feature set. However you can also buy effects for the product to add chorus and reverb. I haven’t done this because I take the output from my iPad out to a mixer where I can add these effects myself. Others might want to use these features and so they are available if needed. This is a fine business model.
This Asshole App Marketing seems to be more prevalent in gaming apps, but I am sure it exists in all types of apps. The idea seems to be to get you to pay much more for these apps than they are actually worth! Once again the consumer pays more and gets less, just like taxes, cell phones, mortgages, insurance, the list goes on ad infinitum. My little tale of woe is a microcosm representing the macrocosm of business practice all over the world. Until we start boycotting these products and services nothing is ever going to change.
I recently downloaded an Atari game, an update of the classic asteroids I loved as a kid. The point of this game is to destroy asteroids and collect crystals which you can use to buy upgrades for your ship. Unfortunately this is not the only currency in the game. Space bucks which must be paid for with real money are required to advance through the game. You can use crystals to purchase them but at a rate of 100,000 crystals to ONE space buck. In order to achieve that you would have to play the first 50 waves 3 or 4 times. Ok so what’s my problem? Well you need at least 10 space bucks to do ANYTHING in the game past the first 50 waves. This would be fine if it were a scheme that allowed you to play the game for a while and then purchase it once you decided you like it but this is not the case. In order to unlock everything in the game you’d have to spend much more than the complete game is worth. You see they are hoping you get hooked and spend a little at a time until, before you realized it you’ve spent more money for the game than you would for an XBox 360 or Playstation 3 game, which has better graphics and when you buy it you get the WHOLE GAME. Well Atari I enjoyed the first 50 waves and then deleted the app. I would have payed for the full game and played through it all if you had the decency to simply sell it to me for a fair price.
Another game that employs this same marketing scheme is Contract Killer:Zombies. You get to a point early on where you can’t advance because you can’t earn the cash to purchase the weapons you need. What a waste of time. If you want to give me a demo which allows me to purchase the game if I enjoyed the demo, that’s cool. What you’ve done here is what I call Asshole App Marketing.
Having said that I am not against in-app purchases if done properly. Some times an app has a few different functions and so you pay for a basic set of functionality and then other functions are available if you want them but you don’t have to have them if you don’t need them. This is a smart and efficient use of in-app purchases. An example of this is TC Helicon’s VoiceJam. You can buy the lite version for 99 cents, and then upgrade to the full version. When you do you unlock a full feature set. However you can also buy effects for the product to add chorus and reverb. I haven’t done this because I take the output from my iPad out to a mixer where I can add these effects myself. Others might want to use these features and so they are available if needed. This is a fine business model.
This Asshole App Marketing seems to be more prevalent in gaming apps, but I am sure it exists in all types of apps. The idea seems to be to get you to pay much more for these apps than they are actually worth! Once again the consumer pays more and gets less, just like taxes, cell phones, mortgages, insurance, the list goes on ad infinitum. My little tale of woe is a microcosm representing the macrocosm of business practice all over the world. Until we start boycotting these products and services nothing is ever going to change.
Comments
Computer Liquidators - Rip Off Artists?
20/08/11 03:41
I recently went into Computer Liquidators located at 229 Horton Street London, Ontario N6B 1L1. I was looking for hard drives to put into a 4 drive external hard drive assembly for the express purpose of recording audio. I asked them about the Western Digital 1 terabyte hard drives they had for sale. Upon further inspection I noticed that the drives they had on offer were “Green” drives. I told the salesperson that I wanted the drives specifically for multi track audio use, I even mentioned that I would be working with 24 tracks or more of audio and that I was concerned that these “Green” drives inherent nature of spinning at slower speeds and shutting themselves off depending on what is required by the user at any given time might cause me problems. So I asked them if they had any of the regular “Non-Green” drives, and was told they were a special order item only. He even went so far as to tell me that all drives he had these power saving features.
The salesperson then told me, three different times in three different ways, siting examples of why these “Green” drives would be fine for what I needed. He told me that the “Non-Green” or “Black” drives were only required for intense video editing or auto cad applications. He said that the black drives ran very hot and were noisy as well. He really did sound like he knew exactly what he was talking about, so thoroughly convinced I purchased 4 1Terabyte drives, with every confidence that they would work just fine.
When I got them home, this was not the case. These drives were painfully slow. Slower than my Samsung USB 2.0 Pocket drive, HALF as fast as my 1TB Lacie Rikiki drive, HALF as fast as my 1TB Seagate Free Agent drive. These “Green’ drives were installed in a firewire 800 drive enclosure, so this combo should have yielded much better results. I ran X bench on all the drives. The internal drive scored 140 (which was to be expected). The USB 3.0 drives scored around 50. The Samsung 500Gb pocket drive scored 27. These supposedly almost as fast as Western Digital Caviar Black drives scored 24. I did some research and found there were settings I could change to yield better performance. After some tweaking I got the score up to 27 the same as the Samsung Pocket drive un-tweaked.
The next test I did blew my mind. I had a 6 or 7 year old Western Digital Caviar Se drive that had been in my old Mac G5. When I placed it in the enclosure it scored well over 50! It was then that I formed the opinion that I had been sold a line of bullshit by the Computer Liquidators sales person. So I brought the drives back to the store THE VERY NEXT DAY! I was then told that despite the fact that I’d been sold the wrong product, and had several hours of my time wasted, I would not receive a full refund. They wanted to charge me a 20% restocking fee which amounted to $70. They wanted me to pay for their salesperson’s mistake. I protested to no avail. They fed me a line of bullshit about not being able to sell the drives for full price having been opened!
Call me crazy but they have a warehouse full of used and refurbished computers for sale. Any moron would realize that at some point you’re going to have an off lease machine come in that needs a new drive. They SAY they are going to sell the drives at a reduced rate but It’s my opinion based on the attitude and mannerisms of the manager who insisted I be ripped off, they are going to sell those drives at full pop. I wasn’t born yesterday, but I simply didn’t have time to argue with these assholes all day. I took my refund and left the store.
I don’t expect them to contact me and offer the money back, and I know that $70 is going to cost them hundreds of dollars that I won’t be spending there. Then I thought to myself, I wonder if all small businesses such as these realize that in the long run they are really ripping themselves off. I mean ARE YOU going to buy anything from a place that charges a 20% restocking fee when they sell you the WRONG product? I mean they never mentioned this restocking fee BEFORE I purchased the items. I was only aware of a possible restocking fee when I read the receipt which was handed to me AFTER my money had been taken. Seems to me I should have been told about this policy prior to completion of the transaction.
In my experience only a fly-by-night operation is this short sited, so my guess is that any sort of in store warranty is going to be meaningless. Still it’s my own fault, I should have gone to Tiger Direct or one of the big chains, but I wanted to support the little guy. I learned a hard lesson, but perhaps I can prevent those of you who live and work in London Ontario from wasting your hard earned dollars shopping at Computer Liquidators which is(in my opinion) a shady operation, whose unofficial motto is “we got your money, now go fuck yourself”!
The salesperson then told me, three different times in three different ways, siting examples of why these “Green” drives would be fine for what I needed. He told me that the “Non-Green” or “Black” drives were only required for intense video editing or auto cad applications. He said that the black drives ran very hot and were noisy as well. He really did sound like he knew exactly what he was talking about, so thoroughly convinced I purchased 4 1Terabyte drives, with every confidence that they would work just fine.
When I got them home, this was not the case. These drives were painfully slow. Slower than my Samsung USB 2.0 Pocket drive, HALF as fast as my 1TB Lacie Rikiki drive, HALF as fast as my 1TB Seagate Free Agent drive. These “Green’ drives were installed in a firewire 800 drive enclosure, so this combo should have yielded much better results. I ran X bench on all the drives. The internal drive scored 140 (which was to be expected). The USB 3.0 drives scored around 50. The Samsung 500Gb pocket drive scored 27. These supposedly almost as fast as Western Digital Caviar Black drives scored 24. I did some research and found there were settings I could change to yield better performance. After some tweaking I got the score up to 27 the same as the Samsung Pocket drive un-tweaked.
The next test I did blew my mind. I had a 6 or 7 year old Western Digital Caviar Se drive that had been in my old Mac G5. When I placed it in the enclosure it scored well over 50! It was then that I formed the opinion that I had been sold a line of bullshit by the Computer Liquidators sales person. So I brought the drives back to the store THE VERY NEXT DAY! I was then told that despite the fact that I’d been sold the wrong product, and had several hours of my time wasted, I would not receive a full refund. They wanted to charge me a 20% restocking fee which amounted to $70. They wanted me to pay for their salesperson’s mistake. I protested to no avail. They fed me a line of bullshit about not being able to sell the drives for full price having been opened!
Call me crazy but they have a warehouse full of used and refurbished computers for sale. Any moron would realize that at some point you’re going to have an off lease machine come in that needs a new drive. They SAY they are going to sell the drives at a reduced rate but It’s my opinion based on the attitude and mannerisms of the manager who insisted I be ripped off, they are going to sell those drives at full pop. I wasn’t born yesterday, but I simply didn’t have time to argue with these assholes all day. I took my refund and left the store.
I don’t expect them to contact me and offer the money back, and I know that $70 is going to cost them hundreds of dollars that I won’t be spending there. Then I thought to myself, I wonder if all small businesses such as these realize that in the long run they are really ripping themselves off. I mean ARE YOU going to buy anything from a place that charges a 20% restocking fee when they sell you the WRONG product? I mean they never mentioned this restocking fee BEFORE I purchased the items. I was only aware of a possible restocking fee when I read the receipt which was handed to me AFTER my money had been taken. Seems to me I should have been told about this policy prior to completion of the transaction.
In my experience only a fly-by-night operation is this short sited, so my guess is that any sort of in store warranty is going to be meaningless. Still it’s my own fault, I should have gone to Tiger Direct or one of the big chains, but I wanted to support the little guy. I learned a hard lesson, but perhaps I can prevent those of you who live and work in London Ontario from wasting your hard earned dollars shopping at Computer Liquidators which is(in my opinion) a shady operation, whose unofficial motto is “we got your money, now go fuck yourself”!
Lies on the phone
13/08/11 18:14
One of the biggest and most obvious scams in our daily lives is perpeterated by the telecommunications industry. My phone bill for instance is just over $62 a month. I don’t have a long distance plan but I have all the calling features except for call forwarding and conference calling. I recently received a call from a Bell representative saying that I could have all the calling features (you know the ones I didn’t ask for because I didn’t want or need them), and that my bill would only go up to $65. I explained that I had no need for the extra features and so I would leave things as they were. Then the Bell representative tried to shake me down for the extra money! He claimed that if I took the extra features and paid these couple extra bucks a month that they would guarantee that my bill would not go any higher than $65 for a whole year! When I asked how likely it was that my bill would go that high anyhow, he said that it was “very likely” because prices are always going up.
I’m not a teenager or some American-Idol watching, cheese eating moron! I’ve seen this sort of thing in a movie or two. Pay us the protection money and nothing bad will happen to your family. That’s what this was, albeit on a smaller scale. But when you add this scam to the litany of sketchy billing practises used by big telecom it stacks up to a death of a thousand cuts. What they don’t seem to realize is that they are cutting themselves! Alternatives are here and more are on the horizon. The economic reality of daily life has begun to erode the Stockholm effect (when victims identify with their abuser) that provided the warm fuzzy feeling many of us have for “trusty old Ma Bell”. Ma Bell and Uncle Rogers have been molesting our wallets with impunity for far too long now.
Let me ask you this, if providing the service needed to make a long distance call is so expensive, how can they afford to give you an unlimited long distance plan that will cost you less than if you made the calls without one? Surely they would lose money providing more service for less money? The reality is that it costs them no more money if you talk 50 minutes rather than 15. The truth is that they are intentionally overcharging you for regular service that you don’t pay for if you don’t use it, to make these long distance plans more attractive. The upshot of this is that now you’re on the plan you’re paying for long distance each month, even if you never place a long distance call!
We all get the flyers, great service, low prices, it’s all so attractive! Read the fine print. The price goes up in 3 months, or 6 months, or a year and they’re hoping you won’t notice! I wonder, if it costs so much to provide these services, how can they afford to offer hundreds of thousands of people this lower price for the time specified? You think they are using it as a loss leader? I doubt it! They are still making big profit even at the lower introductory rate, they are just so pig-face greedy that they want even more! I also wonder if companies like Bell get subsidies from the government to pay for things like cable and telephone poles, you know infrastructure! You see our government (here in Canada) decided a few years back that if they were subsidizing the infrastructure with tax payers money it was only fair that other Canadian companies have access to said infrastructure. It was also hoped that the added competition would result in lower fees for Canadians. Could the individual puzzle pieces of this big picture have been spun so much that they don’t appear to fit together anymore? Could it be that the only reason that Bell’s prices remain so high is that not enough of us have opted to go with the cheaper alternatives that are now available. Maybe we all need to do some research and look for new, better, more affordable ways to communicate with each other?
Rogers are no better with their price is never the price billing. On more than one occasion I have broken down and decided to try a Rogers service. I asked the sales person about all the fees, I even said things like “so when the bill comes at the end of the month what will the price will be?,….”. Trouble is that somehow, no matter what the bill is almost always more than what the salesperson told you it would be. When you call to inquire their attitude is “Well of course you have to pay this extra fee, the government makes us charge you for that” or some other such nonsense. Well, maybe it’s not nonsense the government do love their fees and tariffs and things of that nature. However I specifically asked if there were any other fees. I asked point blank for the total amount of my monthly bill. If it’s an unavoidable certainty that this government fee be added why can’t they tell me this up front? Even if I am comparison shopping if everyone has to charge me these fees it shouldn’t effect my decision to go with one provider or another. Honesty on the other hand does.
The final kick in the crotch is that people in Europe are paying about the same for their internet service which is on average more than 10 times faster than what we have here. Four people in Europe can watch a different HD streaming video program at the same time in the same household! But how can this be? It’s because the people in charge of the internet in Europe are mandated to put a certain percentage of their enormous profits into new technology and infrastructure. Here in North America the folks in charge of the internet have made only a minuscule investment into the backbone that enables them to provide our services. The technology we currently use to provide internet for the majority of internet users is 80’s technology that needs to be replaced and/or updated.
The bitter pill has come to pass. Big telecom didn’t make the required investment incrementally as they should have and now, in this poor economy, have found themselves in a situation where they are maxed out in terms of the bandwidth they can provide their customers. This is why Bell and Rogers want to limit the amount of data you can upload and download to so many gigabytes a month. Well, you can get more gigs, if you’re willing to pay more money to get them.
It’s only a matter of time before some beardy, egg-headed genius comes up with a way to link the world with a technology that bounces signals off the atmosphere (in such a way that it repairs the ozone layer) that’s super hyper mega fast, requires little or no infrastructure because it’s wireless and costs the end user $15 a month! I guess Bell and Rogers would rather save up their money to hire lawyers to sue said inventor back into the stone age. Perhaps they feel their money is better spent lobbying the government to prevent such a technology from seeing the light of day. For all I know this sort of thing already exists!
While you’re thinking about that,…think about this! How is it companies like MagicJack can provide 5 years of home telephone service for $69.95? How can they give you ALL the calling features for this same low price including having your voicemail forwarded to your email! Why am I paying over $1000 each year for a service I could get for $100 for the MagicJack device and 5 YEARS OF SERVICE???
Why Indeed.
This is my opinion, what’s yours?
OSX 10.7 Lion --------------First Impressions
10/08/11 16:06
I recently purchased a new iMac, which came with the Snow Leopard operating system. It came with a snazzy new magic mouse which is designed with Apple’s new Lion operating system in mind. So far there are some things I really like about Lion, the new text to speech voices are quite impressive. The number and the quality of them is impressive, all the different languages are also very impressive. There are also some nice improvements in the choice of how individual windows display themselves. You can permanently set a folder full of images to display thumbnail pics and a directory of text files to always display as a list,… I like that! I also really like the new full screen option especially when working on calendars and things that require my full attention. But there were just a few things that weren’t broke, they were perfect as they were but Apple decided to “Fix” them anyhow!
At first I bemoaned the new mail application until I discovered an option to switch it to classic mode! The new and so called improved view presents you with a sea of text which makes it difficult to zero in on the one item you might want to pick out to look at first. So if you’re like me go into preferences and switch to classic, you’ll be glad you did! However there is no such happy fix for the calendar program. I am still baffled by this thing. If you have multiple calendars there’s no way to see which one is active so that when you start a new event, you don’t know which calendar you’re starting it for! I find myself copying other events and editing them for this reason. Attention Stevie-Boy, it’s no good making things pretty if they are impossible to use! I mean, it’s a freaking calendar! It’s about utility not aesthetics!
Now on to this new Magic Mouse, it’s great except when it’s not. If you only want to use OSX and the programs included with OSX it’s super-fantastic-expiallydocious! However try and play a game with this thing and you’re in for a nightmare of epic proportions. I am a musician who frequently performs in the online world known as Secondlife, and I have to use my old mouse whenever I do. If you rub that mouse the wrong way your view zooms 10,000 leagues under the sea or a mile up into the sky with no warning! It’s frustrating as hell! Also because I am playing a guitar and singing there are all sorts of things that I can do with my 2 button PC centric mouse that I can’t with the Magic Mouse. So if you’re yet to take the plunge to buy a new mac might I suggest you go with a regular mouse plus track pad option? This way you can do all the gestures and iPad like flipping of pages when the mood strikes you and then mouse the night away when it doesn’t!
When I got this new iMac I had a laptop, and the hard drives out of my old G5 that exploded in a very non-spectacular failure of the cooling system, and decided to use the migration tool to get my “stuff” from these other systems. The nightmare that resulted is an ongoing and daily problem. Files which were on the other systems are now locked, so I can’t edit them. Lion had created ghosts of the old machines and if I want to access those old files I have to log into those old operating systems as if I was somehow a different user! I thought the point of the migration tool was that it incorporated the data from your old system for use in the new one! In some cases it worked fine, my Garageband Jam packs and other add-on loops worked out just fine, as well as my projects from the other systems. But for some reason all my song lyrics are now locked, for what reason I can’t say! Now I can still view them, but I can’t see any other way of making them editable other than copying the contents and pasting them into a new file. I will have to do this 180 times over the next little while. What’s up with that? I mean really what gives?
So my first impression of OSX Lion is this. If you had just added the new text-to-speech voices to Snow Leopard that would have been fine with me. Other than the new window view improvements I haven’t seen anything I actually use that is any better than it was.
At first I bemoaned the new mail application until I discovered an option to switch it to classic mode! The new and so called improved view presents you with a sea of text which makes it difficult to zero in on the one item you might want to pick out to look at first. So if you’re like me go into preferences and switch to classic, you’ll be glad you did! However there is no such happy fix for the calendar program. I am still baffled by this thing. If you have multiple calendars there’s no way to see which one is active so that when you start a new event, you don’t know which calendar you’re starting it for! I find myself copying other events and editing them for this reason. Attention Stevie-Boy, it’s no good making things pretty if they are impossible to use! I mean, it’s a freaking calendar! It’s about utility not aesthetics!
Now on to this new Magic Mouse, it’s great except when it’s not. If you only want to use OSX and the programs included with OSX it’s super-fantastic-expiallydocious! However try and play a game with this thing and you’re in for a nightmare of epic proportions. I am a musician who frequently performs in the online world known as Secondlife, and I have to use my old mouse whenever I do. If you rub that mouse the wrong way your view zooms 10,000 leagues under the sea or a mile up into the sky with no warning! It’s frustrating as hell! Also because I am playing a guitar and singing there are all sorts of things that I can do with my 2 button PC centric mouse that I can’t with the Magic Mouse. So if you’re yet to take the plunge to buy a new mac might I suggest you go with a regular mouse plus track pad option? This way you can do all the gestures and iPad like flipping of pages when the mood strikes you and then mouse the night away when it doesn’t!
When I got this new iMac I had a laptop, and the hard drives out of my old G5 that exploded in a very non-spectacular failure of the cooling system, and decided to use the migration tool to get my “stuff” from these other systems. The nightmare that resulted is an ongoing and daily problem. Files which were on the other systems are now locked, so I can’t edit them. Lion had created ghosts of the old machines and if I want to access those old files I have to log into those old operating systems as if I was somehow a different user! I thought the point of the migration tool was that it incorporated the data from your old system for use in the new one! In some cases it worked fine, my Garageband Jam packs and other add-on loops worked out just fine, as well as my projects from the other systems. But for some reason all my song lyrics are now locked, for what reason I can’t say! Now I can still view them, but I can’t see any other way of making them editable other than copying the contents and pasting them into a new file. I will have to do this 180 times over the next little while. What’s up with that? I mean really what gives?
So my first impression of OSX Lion is this. If you had just added the new text-to-speech voices to Snow Leopard that would have been fine with me. Other than the new window view improvements I haven’t seen anything I actually use that is any better than it was.
Squidoo,...SQUIDONT!
21/03/10 19:14
A while back I, like many people jumped on the Squidoo bandwagon. For those of you who don’t know what Squidoo is, it’s a web service where you can create single topic single page web sites called “lenses”. You can monetize these sites by signing up for various advertising campaigns etc. If you have 50 of these “lenses” you can become a “giant squid”. Sounds good right? Well not so fast there sporty! You now have to maintain and update those 50 sites, cause if you don’t Squidoo won’t feature them anymore. This means nobody will be able to find them!
They have some pretty lame excuses for refusing to feature your lenses too. From the looks of it some sort of robot occasionally looks at your site and determines things like, is your title appropriate for your content etc. This leaves little room for tongue-in-cheek jesting or sarcasm!
Anyhow once the novelty wore off I stopped checking in on my Squidoo pages. Today I had a look for the first time in ages. 14 of my 17 Squidoo lenses were no longer featured! I couldn’t help thinking, what a waste of time! So I will be transplanting my Squidoo pages back into this blog here. If you’re considering going the Squidoo route, don’t bother just get your own blog instead!
They have some pretty lame excuses for refusing to feature your lenses too. From the looks of it some sort of robot occasionally looks at your site and determines things like, is your title appropriate for your content etc. This leaves little room for tongue-in-cheek jesting or sarcasm!
Anyhow once the novelty wore off I stopped checking in on my Squidoo pages. Today I had a look for the first time in ages. 14 of my 17 Squidoo lenses were no longer featured! I couldn’t help thinking, what a waste of time! So I will be transplanting my Squidoo pages back into this blog here. If you’re considering going the Squidoo route, don’t bother just get your own blog instead!
When the Levee Breaks the #downloads will cost ya!
11/05/09 13:19
Well it might be true that the RIAA thrives on conflict but even they cannot deny that the masses want their media content online. Be it music, movies, software, television, you name it, it’s online. This is just the entertainment business responding to the demands of their customers, namely, you and me! The internet is the most convenient way to find the content you’re looking for, after all it was designed to be that way from the very start. So why are some factions of “Big Entertainment” resisting this change? I’ll tell you why. The big media companies are scared to death, I mean shaking in their expensive designer boots, scared of a level playing field.
Big Media doesn’t want to compete with you and me, and in the past they haven’t had to. It was nearly impossible for the average person to get a show on TV or get an independent film out to the widest possible audience. Not anymore. Sites like YouTube have made it possible for anyone to make a show on their own terms and put it out to the entire planet. So things are changing but lest we forget that the huge multi-national conglomerates that own the media companies also own your internet service provider!
And so, in case you haven’t noticed most internet service providers now impose limits on your monthly bandwidth. The upshot of this is that if you make the internet your primary source of home entertainment it’s going to get more and more expensive. Some service providers offer several plans at various prices, all the plans in reality feature the same upload and download speed. The only thing that really changes is how much you can download and the cheaper the monthly cost the more you pay per gigabyte when you go over your limit. Sometimes these plans are so out of whack that you can find yourself paying more being on the cheapest service that you would be on a service that is several rungs up the service plan ladder! Not only this many service providers have software in place to slow down your connection if they think you are downloading things you shouldn’t be. This software is so heavy handed in it’s application that it causes problems with online gaming and other perfectly legitimate uses of the internet. This process called “throttling” is prevalent in the ISP industry.
So what is all this subterfuge about? It’s about what will be, dare I say what must be! One day in the not so distant future there will be a levee imposed on the internet. It will be a fee that you will pay to your internet service provider as part of your monthly bill. This money will go into a giant pot. Anytime you download a movie, mp3, software or whatever it will be counted. This information will be used to determine what cut of the pot all the content creators will get from everyone downloading their stuff! It’s simple and the right people get paid. The better or should I say the more popular your content, the more money you can make.
In the meantime if you want to avoid bandwidth limits and throttling look to the smaller internet providers. They are less likely to impose these limits on your internet experience.
Apple's MobileMe - Insanely Not That Great
11/05/09 12:47
Think Microsofty
It's about that time. My yearly subscription to Apple's Mobile Me is due and now that i've replaced most of the MobileMe services with cheaper or free services from places like Google etc It seems I am paying over $100usd for an email account! Seems kinda pricey for a single email account with 5 aliases!
In for a penny, in for a hundred bucks!
Hey no problem, just opt out of all those other services and just keep the email service right?
WRONG!
You have to take a minimum package that costs you over a hundred bucks. Nothing is optional except,..of course if you want to spend MORE money on their services! Apple used to offer email only accounts but suspended this practice some time ago. Unless you were grandfathered in on that old system, you're out of luck if you don't want to pay for these extra, basically useless services.
Wildly Intelligent, but not very smart
I think Apple has lost sight of the big picture. Nearly every day I get colourful ads from Apple. I have no choice but to look at them because that's part of the deal with having an email account from Apple. I really don't mind, it's always cool to see the new products coming out and the promotions and deals that are being offered. The problem is that if I don't renew my MobileMe account I don't see those ads, and the thousands out there just like me also don't see those ads.
Pretend you're Apple's CEO Steve Jobs
Correct me if I'm wrong but those ads are very effective in helping to sell new products, so don't you want as many people to see them as possible? Wouldn't it be smart marketing to have me pay some token fee like say $!9.95 a year for an email only account so that you can keep sending me those ads? I mean where's the downside? I pay you money. You stay connected to me so you can try and sell me stuff! If you're into making money that's gotta be a whole lot easier than counting cards in vegas! In fact that could almost be considered marketing genius.
Perhaps somebody's MENSA card got lost in the mail?
It's about that time. My yearly subscription to Apple's Mobile Me is due and now that i've replaced most of the MobileMe services with cheaper or free services from places like Google etc It seems I am paying over $100usd for an email account! Seems kinda pricey for a single email account with 5 aliases!
In for a penny, in for a hundred bucks!
Hey no problem, just opt out of all those other services and just keep the email service right?
WRONG!
You have to take a minimum package that costs you over a hundred bucks. Nothing is optional except,..of course if you want to spend MORE money on their services! Apple used to offer email only accounts but suspended this practice some time ago. Unless you were grandfathered in on that old system, you're out of luck if you don't want to pay for these extra, basically useless services.
Wildly Intelligent, but not very smart
I think Apple has lost sight of the big picture. Nearly every day I get colourful ads from Apple. I have no choice but to look at them because that's part of the deal with having an email account from Apple. I really don't mind, it's always cool to see the new products coming out and the promotions and deals that are being offered. The problem is that if I don't renew my MobileMe account I don't see those ads, and the thousands out there just like me also don't see those ads.
Pretend you're Apple's CEO Steve Jobs
Correct me if I'm wrong but those ads are very effective in helping to sell new products, so don't you want as many people to see them as possible? Wouldn't it be smart marketing to have me pay some token fee like say $!9.95 a year for an email only account so that you can keep sending me those ads? I mean where's the downside? I pay you money. You stay connected to me so you can try and sell me stuff! If you're into making money that's gotta be a whole lot easier than counting cards in vegas! In fact that could almost be considered marketing genius.
Perhaps somebody's MENSA card got lost in the mail?