Text 14044, 58 rader
Skriven 2006-11-16 17:18:48 av Rich Gauszka (1:379/45)
Ärende: A wee bit of Zune hostility and MS Censorship in blogland?
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From: "Rich Gauszka" <gauszka@dontspamhotmail.com>

http://money.cnn.com/blogs/browser/

Don't have anything nice to say? Review Microsoft's Zune MP3 player, released
Tuesday. At least that seems to be the blogosphere's general rule as
Microsoft's bid for cool gets a frosty reception. Engadget doesn't mince words:
Installing the Zune, "sucked", causing the reviewer's top-of-the-line Media
Center PC to crash several times. It then took the critic another 20 minutes to
load the program on another PC. That's not all Engadget griped about: The
registration process was arbitrarily complex, requiring too much personal
information and demanding that the user create both a Zune "tag" and a Windows
Live ID.

Apple Matters - obviously, not the most objective of sources - deftly rips
apart the absurd complexity of Zune Marketplace's pricing, which requires users
to buy Microsoft "Points" - about 1.25 cents apiece - and then convert prices
from Points to dollars. Maybe math comes easy to Redmond residents with
computer-science degrees, but what were they thinking? People struggle to
calculate tips on dinner!

Gizmodo's Brian Lam says the brown Zune looks like "swamp water Jell-O." Ouch!
Tech blogger Siddiq Bello also mentions the brown color - one of three options
- as one of 10 reasons the Zune will flop.

Digg readers, meanwhile, went for the jugular and openly mocked the photos that
appear throughout the Zune software-installation process. Asks one, presumably
rhetorically: "I'm assuming by the photos of the hipsters on the install
screens that the Zune is meant to be used almost exclusively by white kids in
their early 20s with MTV-approved haircuts?" Posted by Owen Thomas
-+-
Is Microsoft censoring Zune bloggers?

Microsoft (MSFT), awkward and heavy-handed? Say it isn't so! Rocketboom's
Andrew Baron claims that Microsoft tried to get him to agree not to disparage
the company or its Zune MP3 player as part of an advertising deal on the
popular videoblog. "I have been losing sleep over it and decided this is just
not going to be right for Rocketboom," writes Baron on his personal blog, and
goes on to confess his undying love for Apple (AAPL) and his feeling that
Microsoft had "taken advantage of" him. Browser is trying to get a response
from Microsoft; we'll update when we hear back.

Tech blogger James Robertson says that Baron is "'burning [his] bridges' ...
dynamiting them, actually." But Robert Scoble disagrees, saying he would have
declined the Zune sponsorship deal, too. "You define yourself and your business
by the customers you fire," he writes.

Why all the fuss? Microsoft wanted to place a Zune logo on the sites where it
advertised, and the logo came with a restrictive agreement, which reads in
part: "You may not display the Logo(s) on any site that disparages Microsoft or
its products or services, infringes any Microsoft intellectual property or
other rights, or violates any state, federal or international law." It's more
likely that a hyperactive lawyer rather than a scheming media control freak
wrote that contract, but one way or another, Microsoft seriously goofed by
sending out agreements with that language to free-speech-minded bloggers.

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