Ugh. Never, ever “buy” cloud-based media. If you must pay instead of just pirating, pay for a rental, not a “purchase,” as long as it’s significantly cheaper. That’s all you’d be getting anyway.
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Again, if buying isn’t owning, then piracy is not theft.
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Agree wholeheartedly! Verschlimmbesserung encapsulates the phenomenon to a tee, as it refers to any “improvement” that actually makes things worse. I first used it to describe the way Microsoft with bloat with unwanted features, then moved on to using it to describe a colleague’s forcing us to prematurely migrate to Docker, increasing instead of decreasing deployment delays, and now the “improvements” to anything that just makes it harder to use.
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The interesting thing is that when Google Ads first started, we lauded it as advertising done right: not as crappy as the DoubleClick popup spawn or the other really skeevy ad companies. Google, we all thought, finally figured it out. We actually made exceptions for Google because we believed them when they told us they respected the advertisers and the visitors.
And then they bought DoubleClick. The mask was off.
In the end, I guess it was inevitable because ad companies attract the sort of managers and owners who are grifters by heart. I’ve seen in the inside what sort of greedy sociopaths they are, leaning on the coders to just get the shit out there, no desire for clean code, because cleanup means less chances of selling an upgrade when the flaws start to hit. They want things to be shitty so that the clients are forced to keep returning and paying them. (I will never, ever be a frontend dev for an ad agency again!)
I really have no idea how to rein in the parasites. We thought Google pulled it off, but they only hoodwinked us in the end.
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The only way I’ll “buy” digital is if it is bundled with physical. Straight digital? Nope.
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Yup, exactly.
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This sort of thing is why I don’t “buy” digital books. I tried explaining to my father-in-law that I’ll always buy physical because any service can pull this crap. But he remains unconvinced because culling titles hasn’t hit those services (primarily Kindle) yet. eBooks will be the last impacted, I bet.
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Again.
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I still buy them, since it’s easy enough to strip the DRM from them with a Calibre plug-in and store them locally, but you shouldn’t have to put in the extra effort just to keep something you’ve ostensibly “purchased.”
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We sincerely thank you for your continued support.
That’s assuming a lot.
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HP exec says quiet part out aloud when it comes to locking in print customers
HP is squeezing more margin out of print customers, the result of a multi-year strategy to convert unprofitable business into something more lucrative, and says its subscription model is “locking” in people.
Tech vendors – software, hardware, and cloud services – generally avoid terms that suggest they’re perhaps in some way pinning down customers in a strategic sales hold.
But as Marie Myers, chief financial officer at HP, was this week talking to the UBS Global Technology conference, in front of investors, the thrust of the message was geared toward the audience.
[…]
Not news as such, but nice to have it confirmed.
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There have been other posts on Comixology before, but this article was helpful to me to see how much Amazon had already removed from the service before rolling a lesser version of the service into itself.
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Recently in the race to “shittier cable with extra steps”:
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If successful, we know the other brands will follow their lead. Roku already hijacks the home screen for major promotions and then delegates a third of the screen to ads. This may prove that they could be doing more.
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I recently noticed the more invasive ads and the additional un-removable crapware on the Roku home screen. I am quite annoyed.
Of course, Roku is already the company of “Permanent, un-reassignable buttons to services you don’t subscribe to and may no longer even exist, to ruin your viewing experience every time you accidentally lean on the remote” so I can’t say I’m too surprised.
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So, it’s not just me… there is some magical combination of buttons I’ll hit that accidentally take me to Hulu, when I don’t subscribe to it…
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I believe the “workflow” is approximately this: you hit one of the pre-assigned buttons on your remote (or your cat does when sitting on a sunny spot on the couch, etc); it pops up a screen that says “do you want to install this app?”; and there are more buttons on the remote that are interpreted as “OK” than there are “Cancel”. So it only takes two unintended-remote-mashings to get a new app installed and it’s not even that hard to do by mistake.
Personal anecdote, mostly off topic but related to crappy Roku-mote interaction design
I’m reminded of a candybar phone that I used to have, which I mostly loved, except that when it was locked, you could still dial 911 on it. It managed this by locking out every key on the keypad except 9, then if the 9 were pressed locking out everything except the 1, and then… you see where this is going. Short version: the keypad lock was essentially engineered to butt-dial 911 just by being rattled around in your pocket. Brilliant product design, there.
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