one man's journey into creating gibblybits

Saturday, November 13, 2010

Can't get that song out of my head

COMMENTERS! There's gotta be a musical number in there somewhere. I want to eviscerate one here. This was left on the Netflix blog when they made an announcement about Netflix on Android. Here's the comment with my comments on the comment in bold.

Android isn't fragmented, its called choice.
You say potato, I say French Fries. Same fucking thing but one is less healthy for your heart.

And its also called progress.
Fragmentation is progress because choice means never being able to figure out what app runs on what phone. Choice!

If you have an old computer running Windows 98, you can't just expect it to be able to run Vista. Some people run Android1.6, and their devices aren't strong enough to run anything bigger. That's just progress.
Uh, except Windows 98 was 12 years ago. Android was 2 years ago. This sounds like some Steve Jobsisms. Which brings us to the next gem...

And that versions of Android look different from difference manufacturers - that's choice (something apple hates)
Whoa, let's stop right here for a second. Apple hates choice. 1) You are mostly correct. 2) You know who else hates choice? Google. Ford. NBC. The guy selling oranges at the exit ramp. Offering different flavors of your OS to different manufacturers is NOT choice. Businesses don't want you to choose *other competitor products* -- they want you to choose them, Pikachu.

they offer different things to different people - and normal people like that. Its only nerds who freak out.
Actually, no. Let's ignore the runaway success of "evil" Apple, who "hates" choice. There's a well-known force at work in consumer product lines called "overabundance of choice." A consumer, having little time or knowledge to make a decision amongst too many similar-but-different products in a given category can experience a sort of vapor lock, choosing instead a completely different product that is easy to comprehend.
Apple, for those who are older than 11 years old and might remember, once offered a dizzying line of Macs known as Performas. There were Performas in dozens of flavors and configurations -- and they sold like crap. When Jobs came back he simplified the product line and guess what? People bought the shit out of Apple products. To this day each category has a streamlined offering. Based on sales within each category and YOY market share growth, I'd say consumers dig this "evil" lack of choice. Geeks, on the other hand, will do the research and choose something out of a billion configs that matches exactly what they want. That's why they build computers from scratch.


And finally Digital Restrictions Management is evil, so its only natural the free Android fights it.
Personally I'm not a huge fan of DRM, but saying "Android fights it" is asinine. What evidence is there of this? Fragmentation, I guess.
/end of line.

By the way, the commenters pretty much throw the whole "fragmentation is good" argument out the window. Those commenters are what we call "normal consumers" and they are tired of getting screwed.

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