Stardate 20010716.1151 (On Screen): Microsoft is not composed of angels. I am severely critical of their upcoming attempt to switch from one-time sale of their software to a yearly fee for use, for instance. But sometimes they're in a situation where no matter what they do they're going to get criticized. Consider the issue of support for MP3 and DVD in WinXP. They originally announced that they would have no support for MP3 in XP (though you could add it with a third party plugin) and people complained. Then they were going to put in 64Kbit encoding, and people complained that it was lousy quality. Now they've decided to provide that capability with high quality. But if they had done so as part of the base price, they would have been criticized for "bundling and shutting out competitors". So they've decided to charge a fairly high fee ($30 for MP3 and DVD capability) and people are complaining that it is too expensive. Just what, exactly, could Microsoft have done here which would
not inspire criticism (besides, perhaps, liquidate its assets and go out of business)? Maybe we should all save our criticism for the cases which deserve it (like "software as a service").
(discuss)
