Nitpickers and Other Idiots

I spend a good portion of my waking hours working for a software company. It's a small one, so I wear as many hats as I can stack on. Marketing is supposed to be my job, but I run our customer services as well. So as you might suspect, I get to hear, sometimes directly, from unhappy people.

That's OK. When you work in the sausage factory, you know what's in there. You try to make people happy, and for the most part, you can. But there's always a group that can't be made happy. In fact, the only thing that makes them happy is complaining.

I saw this clearly yesterday from the outside - thankfully not my product for once. Apple announced its Windows version of iTunes and the iTunes Music Store. I'm a long time Mac user and am well familiar with both - great product and service. Then, minutes after the 1 PM presentation was over I began to see threads on sites like Metafilter (do your own damn linking) with reports complaining about the download size "why 19 megabytes for an MP3 player" and the performance, "it's painfully slow - no way I could use it - I can't even move or resize the window".

Lots of complaints. Fast.

OK, so I walked next door where someone was downloading the installer. It is 19 mb, but it's not just and MP3 player. That installer includes Quicktime 6.5, which is software for audio and video playback, the iTunes software itself, that does play mp3s, but also catalogs audio, does internet radio, provides "smart list" organization of your musics (very cool) AND does CD burning - which on Windows has always been a crap shoot.

So it's a lot of software, doing a lot of complex things - stop your bitching.

Next, Corey, sitting next door, completes the download in less than 2 minutes (get off dial-up already, it's 2003) and clicks through the installer - very simple. iTunes fires up, looks exactly like the Mac version. He clicks on the title bar and whips the window around the screen. Clicks on the corner and drags the window smaller and bigger. No problem. One click and there's the music store.

So are these posts lies? No, for the most part. It's just that the posters are idiots. They don't read the readme. They complain about things the manufacturer can't control ("why doesn't Apple let me use this in Canada" - it's not Apple, it's the copyright holders). And they complain to get noticed.

Apple is only the example - it happens to everyone. I just get tired of it from time to time.