Give away free shit until unsuspecting newbies follow the flock and are willing to pay for the aforementioned shit.
Opera is an excellent browser, but they committed a self-fulfilling prophecy by charging thirty dollars right out the stable gates, just to use the full-featured version – without free upgrades. Against Mozilla/Firefox/Thunderbird/Camino/Safari and the uber-crappy, yet preinstalled Internut Explorer, who would actually pay to use a damn fine browser?
Apparently, I did shell out the thirty bucks a year ago, for a now-obsolete version of Opera. Now, I am just thrilled to download the newest version for free. Lemme tell ya, it seriously rocks. I would freaking marry this browser if it gave good head. Bygones.
Yet I digress. The trend from giving away free shit until one can provide a paid service is a slippery slope indeed. The Wordpress blogging platform is climbing that path steadily, and rumours are that Mozilla is peeking in that direction as well. Let us wish these open-source successes well, but oh please, let them not digress into Typepadesque Hell.
Why on Earth would a company continue lowering prices to exponentially increase its market share, if that company didn’t possess the technological capacity to provide satisfactory service to its customers? The Typepad service isn’t really that spiffy, and it lacks so many features that even its so-called inferior Movable Type blogging platform provides right out of the box. Typepad is severely limited in its spam-control, design, storage, and backup procedures. Of course, I never knew this until I left Typepad, and now the blogodihexiweb is my vegetarian oyster. At any rate, I’m quite pleased with Wordpress, so I think I’ll marry it as well – after I move to Utah and become a Mormon.
UPDATE: Beth has a suggestion for Typepad Trackbacks – ya know, since they generally don’t work.
8 comments
Sadie, my dear, it takes a writer in full command of the English language and with a definite sense of humor to make a post on browsers both interesting and amusing…
It would appear the juices are, ahem, flowing.
the woman wants to marry a browser. no wonder she likes me.
That was a post about browsers?
I had NO idea.
Seems like typepad were caught on the hop
Anything’s better than blogger though, especially if you don’t know much IT stuff.
I can tell you why Typepad is the way it is in one word: money. The things that you get for free with MT or Wordpress but you don’t get with Typepad are exactly the ones that cause problems at MuNu because they use lots of resources. Lots and lots of resources. For me, that just means extra work tweaking things. For Typepad, which is a hundred times the size, it means full-time employees doing nothing but patching holes all day. (If it takes me three or four hours a week fiddling with that stuff, multiply by 100 and that’s 10 people just to keep things running.)
They obviously have the code – Typepad is pretty similar to Movable Type. It’s just that those features in Movable Type simply won’t work on that scale. Neither would Wordpress.
I’m impressed that Blogger hasn’t fallen screaming in a heap. Um, more often than it actually has. They obviously do employ people to do nothing but batch holes all day.
P.S. Hi Sadie!
P.P.S. Opera rocks, except from some problems with its Javascript support. If they get that sorted before Firefox gets its issues sorted, I’ll switch.
Uh, “patch holes all day”.
Breakfast: 11/1/2005
Try one of these specials with your breakfast:
Riehl World View discovers what CBS’s John Roberts’ was thinking
NIF has News, Interesting and Funny stuff.
Pirate’s Cove talks responsibility
Sadie (Fistful of Fortnights) says so…
Typepad sucks. I am planning to abandon ship asap.