Many people love iTunes, but installing the software on a Windows computer that you depend on is a mistake, from a Defensive Computing standpoint. I say this for two reasons. For one, iTunes is a large complex program and installing any such program is risky, Windows being what it is. In addition, iTunes includes QuickTime, which has been fraught with security bugs. And personally speaking, the fact that I must use iTunes to play music purchased from Apple, rules the whole system out for me.
So, when I heard about Amazon's new MP3 Download store selling normal, ordinary, plain vanilla MP3 songs, I tried it out. The "store" is in beta though, and it shows.
The good news is that I did end up with a couple non-copy-protected MP3 songs. The bad news is that Amazon expects you to install software.
Any time you install software on a Windows machine, there's a risk, one larger than many people realize. So, defensively speaking, I always prefer not to install software. Especially beta software. Then too, if you're using a computer that belongs to your employer, it may be against the rules, or impossible, to install software.
So, I didn't install Amazon's "MP3 Downloader" software, and found my shopping options limited. The most glaring limitation is that without the software you can't purchase an album--all you can do is purchase individual songs. And, if you're looking at a list of songs in an album (or any list of songs for that matter) you can't purchase multiple songs at the same time. Purchasing three songs, for example, requires three different transactions.
User experience
When I first entered the MP3 store, I was greeted with "Hello, Michael Horowitz. We have MP3 Downloads Recommendations for you." But, clicking on the link resulted in: "Sorry, we have no recommendations for you in this category today." Such is beta software.
Initially, I wanted to purchase songs from a particular rock group, and finding the group was easy enough. But they have been performing for years and their portfolio of songs numbers 412. Navigating through these 412 songs was brutally cumbersome.
One of the songs I wanted had an original version from 1971, a remastered version from 2001 and a host of live recordings. I would have happily purchased a studio and a live version, but Amazon works against you here. You can't list the songs in alphabetical sequence--which is needed to sample each rendition and pick a favorite or two. The only possible sort sequences are "best selling" and price, which means endless paging back and forth to find all the instances of a song. Fuggedaboutit.
To get around this, I tried limiting the list to just one song, but this isn't possible. If, for example, you search for "teacher" you get songs with the word teacher anywhere in their name, not just those named simply teacher. In addition, you get artists such as the Moravian Teachers Choir and albums with the word teacher in their title.
Then it occurred to me not to search "MP3 Downloads" (it's the default) but rather to search "Song Titles". Alas, beta software being what it is, this returned many songs without "teacher" anywhere in their name. And, as you might have guessed by now, searching for "teacher" within Album Titles returned all the albums by the Moravian Teachers Choir, regardless of the album title.
To find a single song, the closest you can come is to search for both the artist and the song title. If, however, the song title is also an album title, the search results include all the songs from the album.
Dangerous design decision
To close on a defensive note, the process of purchasing an individual song was too easy. By this I mean that after clicking the "Buy MP3" button for a song, I purchased the song without having to enter my Amazon user ID and password, let alone a credit card number. This was a first for me--all the many Amazon purchases I've made over the years required entering at least a user ID and password.
The danger here, of course, is that anyone can walk up to your unattended or unlocked computer and buy music charged to you. If you have an Amazon.com account, you may want to log off whenever you're done making purchases. To do so, go to the Amazon home page and near the top where it says "(If you're not Michael Horowitz, click here)" click there. The price of security is always inconvenience.
Update: October 2, 2007. For more on the issue of making purchases at Amazon without having to enter a password, see Defensively shopping at amazon.com
Update: October 8, 2007. Brian Krebs in the Washington Post wrote about a new set of bug fixes for QuickTime. See QuickTime Security Update for Windows. Defensively speaking, I wouldn't install QuickTime on a computer used for important work.
Today, July 10th, the web site of The Wall Street Journal is free, sponsored by Dell. Normally the vast majority of the site is available only to paying customers - of either the web site or the hard copy paper.
I mention this to draw attention to an editorial that appeared in the paper on July 3, 2007 entitled Google v. Microsoft.
Background
Windows Vista includes desktop search functionality out of the box and Google offers a free desktop search application that anyone can download from their web site and install. Google complained to Microsoft's antitrust regulators at the Justice Department that there isn't a level playing field when it comes to competition for Vista desktop search applications.
Mistakes
The editorial says
"Web-based applications like desktop search are increasingly central to Google's business prospects...".
The "web-based" description is off base. Desktop search is a desktop application and is not based on the Web. Google's own desktop search application can be installed and run just fine on a computer with no connection to the Internet.
At first I thought this might be just a typo. But the mistakes continued. Quoting again:
"In the original Clinton Administration case against Microsoft, the company was deemed a monopoly because it made 100% of operating systems called Windows..."
Yikes. By that logic, Apple is a monopoly because it makes 100% of the operating systems called OS X. And IBM was a monopoly way back when it made each copy of OS/2. And strike three:
"It is easy for a business with a superior service to peel away the customers of everyone else. That's what accounts for the success of Google's basic Internet search in the first place."
Google never pulled away a single "customer" back in its early days. It converted users of other search engines, such as Alta Vista and Hotbot. I see two differences between "customers" and "users".
For one, users of other search engines never paid for the service. Also, they had very little invested in Alta Vista and the other search engines. That is, there was pretty much no learning curve involved when switching from one search engine to another.
This is very different from say, the competition between Windows and the Mac OS X operating system. Switching involves paying a non-trivial amount of money to get a copy of OS X and a large learning curve to get proficient using both the new operating system and new application programs required to do the same work that was previously done under Windows.
Whatever the advantages of OS X may be, the cost of switching is huge, both in financial terms and time. Switching operating systems could not be more different from switching search engines. To quote myself:
"You don't read PC magazine for mutual fund advice and you shouldn't read the Wall Street Journal for computer advice."
When I said this in the past I was often referring to Walter Mossberg who, in my opinion, has on multiple occasions offered bad computer advice. But this editorial was written by someone who doesn't understand computers at all. It is more off base than Mr. Mossberg ever was.
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