Analyst: ‘Amazon Unbox – Well that didn’t work at all’

20 years ago

“I figured I’d try to download a vide or two for my flight to SF next week. First step, finding some content. Excellent, an old Star Trek episode. Click, purchase, download and install player (which first installed some new version of .NET without asking). Load player, it connects and then nothing. No download. No nothing. It shows but nothing happens. Fifteen minutes of nothing. I click troubleshoot. It tells me it’s checking stuff like DRM. Everything checks out. Message pops up. You have used all licenses for this file. If you want to watch it on this PC, you need to purchase it again. OK. We’re done,” Michael Gartenberg blogs for JupiterResearch.

Gartenberg writes, “Time to un-install this thing and hope it didn’t screw up my PC in the process. $1.99 wiser. I’ll say it again, we understand DRM is necessary to make the content available but it must be DRM that works and NEVER locks a customer out of their content. If Zune doesn’t support Plays for Sure, it’s no wonder. I could see where MSFT would want to use technology that actually worked.”

Full article here.
Microsoft: jacks of all trades, masters of none. Unless you consider schlock distribution to be a trade.