I recently heard of a site called movielink. It is a site that is backed by some of the movie studios. The service it provides is legal, paid, movie downloads. I admit I was excited when I heard about this. I quickly went to their site and was greeted by an error message saying the following:

Sorry, but in order to enjoy the Movielink service you must have Windows 98/SE, ME, 2000 or XP, which support certain technologies we utilize for downloading movies. We do not support Mac or Linux.

Hmm, well, if they do not support me, I cannot support them. I find this immensley frustrating. Both Mac and Linux have been around long enough that there is no technical reasons for this. The only reason to not support the three main platforms – windows, mac, and linux – are laziness, incompetence, or short-sightedness. Supporting multiple platforms allows you to quickly determine if a problem is in your code, or in the platform you are using. You maximize your customer-base. You ultimately future-proof yourself.

Fortunately most of the web that I encounter is not as short-sighted as movielink. Hopefully a competitor will offer up a similar service, without short-sighted and stupid policies.

-Synwan

This entry was posted on Sunday, April 3rd, 2005 at 1:32 pm and is filed under Ramblings. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.