Market bullying
I wanted to find out what Microsoft Expression Media — or, as Microsoft puts it, Microsoft® Expression® Media — is, so I did what any red-blooded Netizen would do: I googled it. The top hit is Microsoft’s home page for it. It wants to show me videos, but I don’t want to sit around while being slowly pummeled with Microsoft’s marketing messages. If I’m going to be marketed to, at least let me skim. So, I clicked on the “Why Buy?” link, thinking I’d get a features list. I just want to know what the product does.
Nope. That loads a popup that asks me to install Silverlight (oops, I mean Microsoft® Silverlight®)The popup conscientiously informs me that once installed, Silverlight “updates automatically,” where “update” means I am giving Microsoft the right to load stuff onto my computer without asking or informing me. In addition, the privacy statement says Microsoft will only transfer information it gathers about me and my computer to third parties if it really wants to. (The privacy statement puts it a little more formally than that.)
So, here I am, trying to find out about a Microsoft product, yet I’m being required to install software I don’t want in the first place, and that has the right to mutate itself without my knowledge. And to get this authorized virus, I have to agree to a privacy-violation agreement that scares me.
Can you imagine the snorting that would occur if a start-up company insisted on this?
So, take this as an example of either inept marketing or implicit bullying by a dominant force. Or both.
[...] Weinberger on his attempts to learn more about Microsoft® Expression® Media: The popup conscientiously informs me that once installed, [...]
[...] Joho the Blog » Market bullying [...]
The page you link to, for me, shows three bullets: find your stuff, work at warp speed, and sharing is everything. Clicking on any of the three gives me a paragraph explaining what the software does.
I’m not sure how what Microsoft is doing here is any different from what Adobe does with Flash (which has as many trademarks, I believe).
Are the terms of use on Silverlight significantly different than the terms of use on Flash? (I honestly don’t know, but it seems as though it’s worth comparing…unless you’re not running Flash either.)
Yes, those paragraphs do give me a better sense than the tag lines, etc. I hadn’t realized they were clickable. But, even so, I want to see a feature list, and I don’t want to download yet another Flash thingy to do so.
I do have Flash installed. And I view PDF docs. I don’t like having to use proprietary standards for this stuff, but the reality is that I do have to. I don’t want yet another one. But my point was that Microsoft’s insistence on this is working against its marketing of Expression. It still seems to me to be dumb marketing that only someone with Microsoft’s dominance would even consider.
But isn’t it *exactly* the same marketing that Adobe uses? You need Flash and/or Acrobat to look at most of their materials as well. I’m just trying to understand why you say that only Microsoft would even consider this.
Hmmm. My last comment, which included a URL for the feature list you were looking for, doesn’t seem to have been posted.
Here it is without the http prefix:
http://www.microsoft.com/expre.....?key=media
(I got to that page by clicking FAQ on the page you initially linked to, and then selecting “Features” from the left sidebar. Since I have Silverlight installed, I have no idea if it would have worked without it.)
Liz., I don’t know why your comment with the url didn’t post. I don’t moderate comments, except for the spammy ones my WordPress settings stop, which should not have stopped yours. Sorry!
I didn’t say that _only_ Microsoft would do something like this. If Adobe had done the same thing — require the use of a _new_ Adobe viewer format to get info about another one of their products — I would have said the same thing. Similarly, if Microsoft required us to get info in Word format. I wouldn’t have whined because AFAIK just about every OS comes with a Word viewer installed.
“It still seems to me to be dumb marketing that only someone with Microsoft’s dominance would even consider.”
I guess it just feels unfair to me to give Adobe a pass on this because they’ve already achieved market dominance. :)
Please insert “something like” into “someone with [INSERT HERE] Microsoft’s dominance.” And I promise that if Adobe forces us to install a NEW viewer to see info about a product unrelated to that viewer, I will write something snarky about Adobe. This is my pledge to you, Liz :)
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