Background Noise: Canned Heat
Last website visited: the rounds :)
Mood: freedom of speech is a wonderful thing...
Right now i want... a good comic to put up today... still looking

to quote my mother, "what the hell were they smoking?" :) what could i be talking about boys and girls? why Real of course! now, i don't know if any of you have been following Real's pathetic attempt at an ad campaign to try to force Apple's hand into allowing more than one type of DRM on the ipod, but their stunts are getting bigger and dumber by the day, prompting even the mainstream media (like, forbes magazine and yahoo news) to openly call them stupid. i love it. Just for fun, here's the summary of forbes' article: RealNetworks Doesn't Rock, i'll get to more Real shooting themselves in the foot in a bit.

It's never a smart move to pick a public fight with Apple Computer, and it's doubly unwise if that fight involves the iPod in some way. When it comes to brand loyalty, users of Apple Computer's computers, and more recently the iPod, are infamous for a level of combative partisanship that would do Rush Limbaugh (notably, a Mac user himself) and Al Franken (notably not) proud....

In the proud tradition of pro-Apple guerilla warfare, iPod fans swamped the petition with pro-Apple comments, prompting Real to remove comments from the petition site.

Real's tactical mistake was forgetting that Apple's fervent acolytes constitute, for Apple's PR and marketing departments, a fifth column for which other companies would trade a CEO's eye teeth. In seeking to rally consumers under the "freedom of choice" banner, Real has wandered into Apple's home marketing turf and gotten a black eye for it....

Real may be correct in principle, but that doesn't trump Apple's right to tell Glazer, Real and all Harmony users to go jump in the lake. Jobs is right to zealously defend the iTunes-plus-iPod business model until such time that it makes sense to change it. And if that means locking Harmony users out of the iPod, that's neither wrong, nor anti-competitive nor anti-consumer. It's just business.

Let's get back to that petition, shall we? After Real stupidly allowed the very public and unchecked petition to have comments, they then very publically stopped letting people comment after the comments didn't exactly favor real ("Bulls***, I'm using iTMS. I, and many others, hope this petition fails", "Hey Real, Don't break my ipod", "Yeah, freedom of choice...and it only works on Windows....yeah...choice."). hehe. I guess their "freedom of choice" mantra only applies if you're choosing their products and services. oops, didn't they mention that before?

So what did the riled up ipod users do? they created Another Petition! this one telling Real to suck it.

But it gets better! Real forgot one teensy-weensy thing when they "closed" the comments on their petition: they didn't actually close anything, they just changed the link from their website to not allow comments. Basically, that doesn't do a damn thing to keep people from still reading the current comments or posting new ones. especially since the link to the petition with comments shot through email-world like a brushfire.

:) basically what i'm saying, is that Karma exists, people. and oh boy can it be fun to watch the deserving get slammed.

and while i'm having fun, read all about How 8 pixels cost Microsoft Millions