Newsweek is giving away all pretense at editorial integrity, while CNet is not far behind ("a radically new instant messaging and communications product"). These "articles" are just big infomercials for the latest Microsoft yawner, too bad the target audience won’t read them. I’m a music freak, I spend a fair amount of time in IM, yet I wouldn’t even touch that piece of junkware with a ten-foot pole.
The ability to override your friends’ desktops with visual spam is now a feature. What’s wrong with you guys? And you mean it’s like a party I go to, but I can’t copy the music that’s being played on? Then, it’s not even as good as sneakerware (the kind of stuff you’d know young people do if you hadn’t locked them for study like animals in a zoo). And it works only with the MSN buddy list. What’s with all that noise about interop we heard three years ago? How about working with Yahoo if AOL won’t hear about it? Oh, and there’s no streaming by the way, you need to complete downloads first. Junk software gleefully reported about in junk media.
Please someone tell me, how is this going to raise the price of the MSFT shares I hold? As if this was going to drive XP upgrades, or finally get some ROI on the billions wasted in broadband investments. Microsoft will need to try harder to make its "Groove for Teens" work, starting with a feature set that doesn’t reek of compromise and focus group marketing.
02/26/03 update: threedegrees — ha ha ha ha ha.
