Why must big companies be so slimy? (*cough Yahoo! cough*)

No, I don’t want your browser bar.
No, I don’t want your anti-spyware software.
No, I don’t want my homepage changed.
No, I don’t want your mail component.
No, I don’t want your ‘daily news’ when I log in.
No, I’d rather not have cute animated graphics replace my ‘:-)’
No, I’d rather you didn’t put your DLLs in C:/windows/system32. They belong in your application’s directory.
If you can get away with not registering them, I’d rather you didn’t do that either.
No, I’d rather you didn’t store your information in the registry. I hate the registry, and would rather have a bunch of little configuration databases, one per application, instead.
No, I don’t want you to start by default. I’ll *tell* you if I want you to start when the computer boots.
No, I don’t want to upgrade to Vista to get new features.
No, I don’t want you to check for upgrades by default. I’ll *tell* you if I want you to stay updated.
No, I don’t want to restart my browser, my computer, or anything else. For that matter, you’re a IM client, what are you doing affecting my browser in any way?
No, I don’t think it’s reasonable for the ‘default install’ to break my web browser.
No, I don’t want to pay 2 cents a minute for a service that many others, including Skype, provide for free.

I think I’ve decided Skype is the ultimate IM:

1) It does voice, video, file transfer, and tex
2) By default, it doesn’t start with the computer
3) It doesn’t attempt to do anything funny to my web browser. It’s a IM, it knows it’s a IM, and it stays there
4) It has sane settings right out of the box

5 Responses to “Why must big companies be so slimy? (*cough Yahoo! cough*)”

  1. don_diego Says:

    You didn’t install the Yahoo client, did you? That’s what Gaim is for. 😉

    -D.

  2. sheer_panic Says:

    Kayti wants video. Does Gaim do video now?

    S.

  3. don_diego Says:

    Unfortunately, no, but I discovered there is a free client out there, Kopete for KDE/linux, that supports video on MSN and Yahoo IM. The biggest problem with Skype is that I don’t know a single person who uses it. 😉

  4. anonymous Says:

    errrr, in terms of use – I prefer skype all the way. but there is the funky thing about it accessing…. I don’t recall, some hardware info each time it boots… Seemed fishy.

    But at least it isn’t running Echelon cycles in the background…

  5. ClintJCL Says:

    The registry’s not all bad. Imagine if you need to remove a piece of spyware or somesuch —

    with an INI/database, and you have no idea where it may live…. Maybe the EXE is hidden in a hidden folder in your start menu (I’ve seen that), and it’s INI-file/equivalent is hidden somewhere else where it will take forever to find it.

    But if it uses the registry instead, you have ONE place to search for — ONE search for MULITIPLE programs.

    Or say, you want to remove all references to F:\YOUR_PORN_DIR …. Would you rather find an INI for photoshop, erase it from recent items there … find the INI for your image viewer, erased it from recnet items there, etc… possibly “N” times… or simply search through your registry for all occurrences of that?

    Registry can be annoying, but doesn’t RedHat basically have a package installation ‘registry’ that’s the exact same thing?

    not quite related:
    I remember trying to install GAIM, and it saying “it’s already installed”, trying to uninstall it, and it saying “It’s not installed, you can’t uninstall it”, asking unix gurus who gave me the command to wipe that database, and still having the problem. Then, no soundblaster support for Quake1. Formatted back to windows…!

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