I’m not your target audience

[in which I rant]

I’m not your target audience…

• Radio talk shows: I don’t want brainless blather in the mornings. I turn on the radio to get music. If you’re talking, I’m changing the station or even turning the radio off altogether.
• Work-related podcasts and videos: I don’t want information provided to me in a podcast as I don’t like listening to them. Ditto work-related videos. Just give me the transcript to speed-read through.
• Control-less iPod Shuffles: I liked the concept of the first and second generation Shuffles — they seem great for working out or running and B loves his for that very reason. Then they moved to the Shuffle-without-controls which is a non-starter for me leaving only the Nano. Why would I want to buy proprietary headphones to control my music device?
• Video on iPod/iTouch/iPhones: Nanos started out with a small screen that keeps getting bigger with each generation reportedly so people can watch videos and movies. Movies on such a small screen? Are you serious? Sure I watch the random movie trailer on my iPhone but I can’t imagine watching something more than 2 minutes on such a microscopic screen.
• Animated web ads: I realize that web content isn’t free and in general I’m ok with ads on web pages. If it moves, however, be it via animated GIF, javascript, or (heaven forbid) Flash — you’re getting blocked. Ditto anything that does pop-up or pop-unders. Your ads should be relevant and unobtrusive (see Google Ads) if you violate either of those edicts you’re getting AdBlocked.
• Flash-based webpages: I’ve long been an advocate of non-Flash based web pages. Flash is rife with security issues, browser compatibility issues, unstable, and based on the iPhone porting reports also resource intensive. If you’re still designing Flash-based web pages today you’re also alienating every single iTouch and iPhone user out there who can’t see your content. Die, Flash-based web pages, die — and take your evil twin Silverlight-based web pages with you.
• Windows 7: I’m told you’re the best Windows yet. You’re stable and even have an XP emulation layer to run all of those XP apps that won’t run in Vista or native in Windows 7. Based on the customers I support via freelance: you’re still a solution looking for a problem. You won’t run on the hardware that we have happily running XP. The application versions we use, and work for us, aren’t supported on you. You’re years too late to the game. When XP downgrades finally become unavailable for new computer systems, you’re no longer the winner-by-default: we’ll be evaluating your actual merits against Mac OS X and Linux.
• MS Office: I’ve converted two MS Office die-hards over to OpenOffice and they haven’t even blinked. OOo uses the tried-and-true menuing interface that everyone is familiar with, opens/saves your documents, and comes at an amazing price: free. What is it that you have to offer again?