Big Company. Stupid Mistake.

I'm getting really sick of really big companies making really foreseeable mistakes and then pretending the whole thing was unavoidable. Why? Because the chasm between the obviousness of the mistake and the lame excuses they make for them seems to indicate that they knew they were lying all along, but decided to blame it on some unnamed programmer or clerk. Here are two recent examples.

Amazon yesterday put into action a plan to remove 'sexually explicit' books from their sales ranking, but not from the site. In fact, depending on who you believe, they may have removed them from their search engine. Or maybe they didn't. There's a memo from them that says they did, and a memo that denies that they ever wrote the memo. And denies that they broke the search engine, in spite of the fact that it stopped working for some 'adult material' at the same time as the first memo said they would. And you will not be at all surprised to learn that every book that has a hint of a gay or lesbian theme, whether explicit or not, has disappeared. So you will be happy to note that wonderful old standbys like "The Anarchist Cookbook" 2002 edition is still ranked. (#6,484 in Books, #2 in Books > Nonfiction > Politics > Reference) But clearly dangerous stuff like The Joy of Sex is not ranked. Uh. Scuse me. I mean the hardcover version. Paperback is still ranked #1,944,082 in Books and #73 in Sex Instruction. And maybe the final cherry on this idiot sundae is that Amazon did this on a Saturday, and it immediately hit the Twitter Trend List as #amazonfail, and now they are scrambling (even as I write this) to put some of these books back in the rankings. So far they have restored Lady Chatterley's Lover by D.H. Lawerence and Moll Flanders by Daniel Devoe.
But they continue to describe this as a 'glitch'.

And in other news, Apple decided to fiddle with the only music retailing model that is currently profitable. IN THE ENTIRE MUSIC BUSINESS!! The ubiquitous iTunes store and iPod and it's $.99 song downloads has been working for a few years now. Working so well that CD sales have been down in double digits stumbles ever since. So the smart thing to do now would be two introduce a 3 tiered pricing system. Right? Because clearly something is broken.... Right? Well that's what the brain trust at Apple decided. I'll just go ahead and quote Slashdot on this.

"Steve Jobs vowed weeks ago that when iTunes shifted to a tiered price structure in April, older tracks priced at $0.69 would outnumber the contemporary hits that are rising to $1.29. Today, several weeks later, iTunes made the transition. While the $1.29 tracks are immediately visible, locating cheaper tracks is proving to be an exercise in futility. With the exception of 48 songs that Apple has placed on the iTunes main page, $0.69 downloads are a scarce commodity.

So a bait and switch that results in a 30% price increase, and coincidentally at the nadir of the worst economic crisis in 80 years, perhaps ever, seemed like just the thing to do for the largest marketer of music in the business. Well, I'm no economist, but I have a hunch this is going to cause some trouble for Apple.

And in a final knuckleheaded irony, our friends at Amazon have NOT changed their music download prices to match iTunes. In fact, they have dropped the price of a lot of tracks to $0.89. So you can't find any Beatles or Rolling Stones on the cheap, but you CAN find 'You Really Got Me' by The Kinks for $.89. Also for 89 cents is 'I Can't Make you Love Me' by Bonnie Raitt, which Alison Iraheta sang on American Idol a week ago. Get it before she makes it famous again.

Now let me prognosticate for a moment. I think that Microsoft is about to pull one of these. MS released Windows XP nearly 8 years ago, and it has been universally loved and adopted since then. 5 years later, after at least a year delay, they released Vista and almost immediately withdrew support for a downrev install of XP if you decided that you don't like Vista. Well after 3 years, lots of people do not, in fact like Vista and want to go back to XP. But you can't unless you buy a copy of XP and even at that, you have to jump through some not inconsequential technical hoops to get there. But here is the prognosticating.

Microsoft will be releasing Windows version 7 any day now. (Well, probably October. Microsoft likes to release in the fall). And they are promising that they will still not support a downrev to XP. So if you buy a PC after next October, be sure to add another $100 or so to the price to support the downgrade to the only working consumer verion of Windows.

But again, like raising prices or censoring 300 year old erotica, no one could possibly predict that people will be upset when they have to run the newest, buggiest version of Windows.