Assimilated and illogical, or how we really feel about LinkedIn and Windows 8

Fast and furious — it’s not just the name of a crappy movie series starring Vin Diesel and The Rock; it’s also an apt description of my email inbox these days. Here are some of the messages that have been zooming by at 100mph.

Windows H8

In my most recent piece about Windows 8 (“Windows 8 as New Coke? That’s an insult to New Coke“), I bemoaned the lack of Windows Phone apps for my HTC Win 8X handset — specifically Pandora, Roku, and TiVo.

[ Cash in on your IT stories! Send your IT tales to offtherecord@infoworld.com. If we publish it, we’ll keep you anonymous and send you a $50 American Express gift cheque. | For a humorous take on the tech industry’s shenanigans, subscribe to Robert X. Cringely’s Notes from the Underground newsletter. | Get the latest insight on the tech news that matters from InfoWorld’s Tech Watch blog. ]

Reader C. S. correctly points out that the WinMo Market does offer an Pandora app for Windows 8. Oddly, it doesn’t show up when I search for “pandora” on my phone — unless I add a space after the word. (Other Pandora options, mostly music and podcasts, show up without the space.) Someone please riddle me that.

My larger point — that Windows 8 is yet another botched Microsoft attempt at marketing — inspired a lively and occasionally heated discussion. Reader C. C. S. had this to say:

Microsoft has too many prestidigitators designing software. This time they designed a Magic Set for budding magicians with little to do but uncover hidden rabbits. Windows 8 should be renamed “Hide & Seek” or “Eight Ball”…

Why should anyone have to invest more time “studying” and navigating the Windows Operating System than the effort required for programs running in the Windows environment?

Unless you’re one of those RTFM Microsoft fanboys, where studying the OS is the only fun they’re ever likely to have.

LinkedOut

I was, shall we say, less than kind to LinkedIn on the occasion of its 10th birthday earlier this month (“Happy birthday to LinkedIn, the biggest social network no one uses“). I guess I had a lot to get off my chest about the site, which has been exceedingly aggressive in building up its network to the point of being downright spammy.

K. L. J. wrote:

I just happened to stumble on [your]blog entry. It is both cynical and mildly funny, but it does touch on some of the things I find disconcerting about this supposedly “professional” network tool…. The longer I have browsed LinkedIn, the less I think it is useful for anyone other than those Extroverts in a marketing, IT or recruiting function. LinkedIn seems to be getting worse rather than better, IMHO.

Actually, “cynical” and “mildly funny” are two of the nicer things anyone has said about me lately — so thanks for that.

Reader B. J. agrees:

You are dead nuts on that [LinkedIn’s] value gets diminished every day. I’ll admit to having a 1,000 or so connections of which I actually remember probably 200 of those and of those 200 maybe 50 or really 1st-degree connections. It will be interesting to see how the story plays out going forward.

“Dead nuts” is much closer to what most people say about me.

On the other hand, K. S. writes that LinkedIn has become the numero uno social network for his business.

We can’t do business without Linked In anymore. In fact, for us, it has almost completely replaced Facebook, Google+, Twitter, Orkut, etc. for business-to-business contact maintenance, contact/prospective employee searching and general business communications. When we post and measure posts/ announcements across all media — LinkedIn posts are the most read of all. It’s really not close for our market (aerospace) — the clickthrough rates are higher than from all other measurable media combined.

Clearly I am in the wrong field. Mom always wanted me to be an astronaut.

Damn the DRM, full speed ahead

I recently wrote about yet another digital rights management battle, this one taking place within the confines of the emerging HTML5 spec (“DRM sinks its fangs into HTML5, with help from Netflix, Google, and Microsoft“). At the end I asked, “Is DRM evil and, if so, how can we drive a stake through its heart”?

G. B. says the answer is to go full analog:

I buy printed books, own no e-reader, use torrents only to download Linux distros, use no Google products, sign up for no “free (media/doc) memberships” online, buy nothing with DRM unless I’ve got a cracker, have become more determined about such things over time, and suspect I’m not the only one with habits like these.

Perhaps. But he may be the only one who reads my blog — or any blog for that matter.

Boldly gone

In my piece about Prenda Inc. (“Copyright trolls feel wrath of Khan, Klingons, Romulans, and Starfleet“) I asked readers how they would handle these Ferengi-like attorneys. Trek fan T. W. responded thusly:

Set phasers on stun. Step 1: Stun them (ALL of them) once for every lawsuit the’ve foisted! Step 2: Re-set phaser to kill.

That works for me. Take her out of orbit, Mr. Sulu.

What’s on your mind? Post any random thoughts below or email me: cringe@infoworld.com.

This article, “Assimilated and illogical, or how we really feel about LinkedIn and Windows 8,” was originally published at InfoWorld.com. Follow the crazy twists and turns of the tech industry with Robert X. Cringely’s Notes from the Field blog, and subscribe to Cringely’s Notes from the Underground newsletter.