Charles on… anything that comes along

Two more articles (oh, busy busy busy).

Over at Netimperative, in No, I’m just looking before I buy it online I’ve been examining the way that high street chains are trying to follow people online by putting their advertising there. Not going to work, I think - shopping over the Net is getting so much easier that there are only a few wrinkles left to work out. However, some of those are showstoppers.. which only one or two search engines have figured out. (Have you tried searching for “DVD recorder £200″ on some shopping comparison sites lately?)

Meanwhile at The Register I’ve looked at why the BPI (the record label representative) is suing another arm of the music business, the Mechanical Copyright Protection Society. (And also ask: what the hell is mechanical copyright on digital songs?)

These posts might be related (the database thinks..):
• iTunes et al vs the mobile networks: a clear winner in the short term.. (6 April 2005; score: 70.13%)
• In the Guardian: stop this online sharing now! (25 January 2008; score: 48.56%)
• Yahoo! Music's uningratiation; and the answer to dialogue boxes (13 May 2005; score: 43.13%)

Oh yes. Via John Gruber’s Daring Fireball Linked List (if you pay, you get the RSS feed - which is handy), comes a pointer to Featuritis vs. the Happy User Peak.

Go there and look at the curve, which ranges from “Nice, but I wish I could do more” to “I’m so glad they added this” to “Cool!” to “I Rule!” to the Happy User Peak as more features are added - but then downslopes, and declines to “Guess I better look at the manual..” to “Hey, where the fsck did they put that?” to “Now I can’t even do the ONE SIMPLE THING I bought this for..” to “I Suck!”

It’s sort of a riff on Don Norman’s “The Design of Everyday Things” (though I found some of that book a trifle overdone). But it’s true: iPods lie down at the “fewer features, happier users” end, while so many more of the wannabe digital music players lie up there with the “many features… fewer users” status.

And as it’s a blog with an entry called “Stop your presentation before it kills again!” I think you pretty much have to go there right now. Just after you leave a cogent comment down there.

These posts might be related (the database thinks..):
• So who's the Apple user? (19 May 2008; score: 26.77%)
• FUBAR on a Mac: Powergen's web site (24 September 2004; score: 25.28%)
• Gus Mueller on watching the money not come in (11 January 2006; score: 22.64%)