If At First You Don’t Succeed
Source: agentbedhead.com
Give away free shit until unsuspecting newbies follow the flock and are willing to pay for the aforementioned shit.
Opera is an excellent browser, but they committed a self-fulfilling prophecy by charging thirty dollars right out the stable gates, just to use the full-featured version – without free upgrades. Against Mozilla/Firefox/Thunderbird/Camino/Safari and the uber-crappy, yet preinstalled Internut Explorer, who would actually pay to use a damn fine browser?
Apparently, I did shell out the thirty bucks a year ago, for a now-obsolete version of Opera. Now, I am just thrilled to download the newest version for free. Lemme tell ya, it seriously rocks. I would freaking marry this browser if it gave good head. Bygones.
Yet I digress. The trend from giving away free shit until one can provide a paid service is a slippery slope indeed. The Wordpress blogging platform is climbing that path steadily, and rumours are that Mozilla is peeking in that direction as well. Let us wish these open-source successes well, but oh please, let them not digress into Typepadesque Hell.
Why on Earth would a company continue lowering prices to exponentially increase its market share, if that company didn’t possess the technological capacity to provide satisfactory service to its customers? The Typepad service isn’t really that spiffy, and it lacks so many features that even its so-called inferior Movable Type blogging platform provides right out of the box. Typepad is severely limited in its spam-control, design, storage, and backup procedures. Of course, I never knew this until I left Typepad, and now the blogodihexiweb is my vegetarian oyster. At any rate, I’m quite pleased with Wordpress, so I think I’ll marry it as well – after I move to Utah and become a Mormon.
UPDATE: Beth has a suggestion for Typepad Trackbacks – ya know, since they generally don’t work.

















