New Feature: Rants

posted in political by jon on 2004-06-17

I've decided that I need to direct my frustrations with stupidity more directly than just posting them randomly in a blog, so I decided to embark on a new campaign: emailing the people that annoy me to tell them what I think. First victim: audiobook purveyor audible.com. Email to customer service:--------------To: greatideas@audible.comSubject: A Few IdeasI have been registered with Audible for quite some time, but just purchased my first audiobook today. Here are a few ideas for improving your service/site. 1.) Drop the stupid DRM a. DRM is artificially restrictive: Can't I loan a paper book? Why should YOU control what I do with a product after I buy it b. If I can't do what I want with what I buy, what have I actually purchased? c. And worst of all, I have to run your substandard software, which I can't even do since you don't..2.) Support Linux a. Your site is served on Solaris, why not support Unix based customers? b. If you insist on DRM, make a cross platform client, even if it has to be Java3.) Get some bandwidth a. On a full T1 with sparse usage, the estimated time to pull down a 36M file is 60 minutes. That’s just ludicrous b. Your site is slow and unresponsive overall, browsing is painfully slow and it ain't on my end4.) Stick to standard html a. Use standard a href to create a link, lose that "javascript:linkThis('/site/recommends/unabridged.jsp')"crap. Some of us enjoy opening multiple windows or tabs b. Kill the java-based "live help". Again, not all of us run windows with IE and the latest java runtime5.) Be honest about your shortcomings a. If you're going to make using your product a painful experience, be honest about it. Put a huge banner on your site saying that although you enjoy serving your site on Apache free of charge, you refuse to serve any customer who hasn't sacrificed their firstborn son on the Microsoft/RIAA altar. Regards, Jon Alliejon(at)jonallie(dot)com

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