Cluetrain

I read with relief that Apple has bailed on plans to go with tech support based in India. As Jobs explains:

In late May, Apple dismissed most of the 30 new hires at its subsidiary in Bangalore. (A handful working in sales and marketing will stay on.) Spokesman Steve Dowling would say only that Apple had "reevaluated our plans" and decided to provide support from other countries. Another source familiar with the situation, though, says the decision was cost-driven. "India isn't as inexpensive as it used to be," the source says. "The turnover is high, and the competition for good people is strong." Apple feels it "can do [such work] more efficiently elsewhere."

Here is where I should confess that my relief, as a Mac owner and, since 2002, semi-evangelist, comes not from Jobs' business rationale but from my own rather underwhelming experiences with India-based support.

Whether it's been Travelocity or United or Linksys or Dell or a number of other conglomerates, I've been left feeling consistently dissatisfied, disrespected, dismissed, denigrated and generally unappreciated by their "foreign" liaisons. (Travelocity and United couldn't care less about my itinerary glitch, Dell gave me the runaround more times than I care to admit [and at the end I had to pay for the privilege] and a Linksys rep actually attempted to blame a failing Linksys router on the fact that I was using a Mac. [I ended up futzing through and finding my own solution: manually re-setting the router's IP range].

I know I'm treading on some liberal taboos here. A reactionary reading of this post might place me square in the realm of being racist -- which is anything but descriptive. Perhaps that's why nobody every says the emperor has no clothes when it comes to foreign-based customer service.

Despite what people might assume, I don't consider it a race issue -- I consider it a cultural issue -- a corporate culture issue.

Here's the question: Do Indian support firms have any actual authority to provide meaningful customer service? More significantly, do any customer service departments for major corporations have any meaningful capability to really take care of their customers?

Last year, when I had some fairly persistent problems with my old 17" iMac, which went through no fewer than six midplane assemblies in one year, an understanding US-based customer service rep actually gave me a free upgrade of my Final Cut Pro suite to the then-current FCP 4.5 HD version. That counted for a lot, because I was incredibly frustrated with the (let's face it) crappy hardware components Apple was using in some of its machines, and their little concession to me bought a lot of goodwill on my part. At least they cared about me as a customer. And what did it cost them, in the end, to give away this upgrade? (In fact, I just upgraded again to FCP Studio, so they kept me on the paying upgrade path.)

I have to wonder: Would a wage earner in Bangalore have any authority to do this?

Certainly other tech support challenges can arise over the phone, such as ability to speak clear English -- but that's something that can happen within the US, even with native speakers -- and, for the most part, I've not run into that particular problem all that often.

But I do feel like I am attempting to speak across the divide. When corporations outsource their customer service to foreign lands, there's an implicit statement there that they really just don't want to deal with you. "Talk to the hand," they are in effect saying by sending customers to sub-contracted companies that can only say "no," and never "yes."

In other words, the attitude ingrained in corporate culture that the customer is a problem to be contained and managed -- this is the real problem.

Is there more to it? Police departments learned that you can't ignore culture when it comes to community relations -- and thus effectiveness within communities -- and have, over the past decade or two, instituted more community-based patrols and recruited from the communities they "serve and protect." Could it be time that corporations all over the world realize that the best customer service comes from the customer's own culture?

I don't know. But first they have to realize that customers are not problems but resources -- for money, for product/service feedback, for insight into new opportunities. Does anyone really know of any Fortune 500 companies that do that? Lately it seems "they" are more interested in service of process rather than service of the customer.

There's a petition afoot to get AOL to cease charging money for reliable email service. (The charge is to the sender. If you don't pay, AOL may choose not to deliver your email ... or simply hold it for a few days first. How's that for customer service!)

Hawk Wings (a new favorite blogger who writes about Apple widgets and gizmos) reports:

Over 50 organisations have written an open letter to AOL asking it to rethink plans to use Goodmail’s CertifiedEmail, which the letter describes as “a threat to the free and open Internet”.

The groups range across the social and political spectrum from the Electronic Frontier Foundation to the Gun Owners of America.

I still fall back to the question I asked before: Why would you subscribe to AOL when they are extorting money from everyone who might want to get in touch with you?

The petition says, in part:

The bottom-line is that charging an "email tax" actually gives AOL a financial incentive to degrade email for non-paying senders. This would disrupt the communications of millions who cannot afford to pay your fees-including the non-profits, civic organizations, charities, small businesses, and community mailing lists that have arisen for every topic under the sun and that make email so vital to your subscribers.

And what if other Internet service providers retaliate and start demanding their own ransoms to accept mail from your millions of users? Your company works hard to simplify the Internet. Don't start a surcharge war that will complicate it with tiered services and dozens of middleman fees for every simple act of communication.

I don't have any statistics, but I know several people who have ditched AOL for gmail and other services so they can get reliable email service. It's only a matter of time before those same people wonder why they pay a premium for AOL's notion of "a better internet" when it's worse than what you can get from a less pernicious ISP. There are plenty of affordable ISPs and free email services.

If you feel strongly about this issue, go ahead and sign the petition. But the real convincer will be the bottom line. AOL will change if they start losing money from this policy. (At least that's the theory, but who knows what the management will decide?)

Otherwise, hey, they're getting paid to deliver emails they used to deliver for free. If the stick-up works, the perps will continue their hold-ups.

Here's something I posted on BlogHer....

I think that, given the incredible activity on BlogHer these past few weeks, the answer is undoubtedly "yes." [Remarks on site stats deleted. -LS]

But I have to wonder about Technorati and their inability (or unwillingness?) to track BlogHer. What prompted me to write this is that, as I was adding BlogHer to my Technorati faves list, I saw that Technorati did not have any up-to-date info on BlogHer.

I manually pinged Technorati but after some 20 minutes now, still no change.

(And this isn't nearly as bad as seeing our business site listed as not having been updated in 186 days! Granted, we don't blog there every day ... it's been a few weeks now ... but the last posts were earlier this month! Anyway....)

Some might ask: Why not say Technorati schmechnorati! and be done with it? Do we all need the A-list mentality, as Jory asks? Is mobilejones right? Does Technorati even matter in this MySpace world?

At this point, I have to laugh at myself, because I noticed all this while participating in Technorati's latest popularity measure -- which is very undemocratic, tends to mainstream traffic, and generally rewards the already-successful. And here I was excitedly playing along! (Aren't I the disruptive little blogger now?)

Still, when the question remains, "Where are all the women bloggers?" -- the best answer is right here, on BlogHer, in the blogs written by these amazing contributing editors, and in the blogrolls. Of course, list obsessions are a big deal for some bloggers -- and was a topic in last year's conference. And so, by the way, was Technorati's apparent blindness to women's blogs in general. Yet, as Charlene Li noted last year, people pay attention to lists. Maybe we shouldn't sneeze at them.

Subverting the mainstream is part of the disruptive nature of the long tail -- and the Cluetrain will win out, in the end. But part of "success" -- which, in this case, we can consider being noticed -- comes from gaming the system, and while we may pooh-pooh such gimmicks and tactics when it comes to our own blogs, it behooves us to do the little things that can add up to a slightly improved collective visibility. (And I know, we want to get the pretty buttons going, too! Soon!)

So here's a link which adds BlogHer to your faves list (if you are registered there):

Maybe if enough people do this, the Technorati boys can't help but notice that there's a living, breathing website here. (Will this post change things, as public pleading did for Alexandra?)

(ps - And no judgments, please, on my other faves. I was just getting started when I saw what it said about BlogHer.)

Updated 1 March 2006, 1:07 PST

I just don't get it. When I read that AOL and Yahoo were going to start charging the world to send email to their users, I guess I just couldn't believe they'd be so dumb. It sounded like an urban legend, even though published in the New York Times.

Already, though, people I know are suddenly not receiving their emails ... from friends, from email lists to which they've subscribed.... Is this supposed to be a benefit?

I can say that I am not inclined to ever pay AOL or Yahoo or anyone else a toll so I can send one of their subscribers a message. We'll find other ways to communicate.

But some people will pay for that access: spammers. Why? Because they send messages as part of their business plan. It's all about money, and all AOL and Yahoo have done is increase their cost of doing business. Meanwhile, real messages get blocked, held up, lost.

I guess "a better internet" is one where AOL charges for what most everyone else does for free.

Today, Lakshmi Chaudhry has an interesting article up on In These Times: Can Blogs Revolutionize Progressive Politics?

The article runs down the usual dichotomy blog observers dwell on: how blogs are at odds with mainstream media. Prospects for how blogs might change the future are measured not in how the interactive media form is changing our culture and the very way we engage with the world, but in whether blogs can generate a specific outcome in the 2006 elections.

An Internet-fueled victory at the polls would certainly be impressive—no candidate backed by the most popular progressive blogs has yet won an election. But electoral success may merely confirm the value of blogs as an effective organizing tool to conduct politics as usual, cementing the influence of a select group of bloggers who will likely be crowned by the media as the new kingmakers.

Winning an election does not, however, guarantee a radical change in the relations of power. Technology is only as revolutionary as the people who use it, and the progressive blogosphere has thus far remained the realm of the privileged —a weakness that may well prove fatal in the long run.

In 2006, the biggest question facing blogs and bloggers is: Will their ascendancy empower the American people—in the broadest sense of the word—or merely add to the clout of an elite online constituency?

I don't think I agree with that conclusion -- or even the question. And I think the problem gets down to preconceptions of what a blogger is.

Blogs are literally vox populi—or at the least the voice of the people who post entries and comments, and, to a lesser extent, of their devoted readers. Telling bloggers that they’re wrong or to shut up is somewhat like telling respondents to an opinion survey to simply change their mind. When journalists reject bloggers as cranks or wingnuts, they also do the same to a large segment of the American public who seeblogs as an expression of their views. Such dismissals feed the very alienation that makes blogs and bloggers popular.

The irony is that bloggers are most powerful when they work in tandem with the very media establishment they despise. “Bloggers alone cannot create conventional wisdom, cannot make a story break, cannot directly reach the vast population that isn’t directly activist and involved in politics,” says Peter Daou, who coordinated the Kerry campaign’s blog outreach operations. Blogs instead exert an indirect form of power, amplifying and channeling the pressure of netroots opinion upwards to pressure politicians and journalists. “It’s really a rising up,” says Daou.

Can this online rebellion lead to real political change? The prognosis thus far is encouraging, but far from definitive. [emphasis added]

See, this is where I have a problem. I submit that the only reason we have what might be called "Establishment Bloggers" is because, today, the information media environment is still dominated by the international media conglomerates. Of course blogs can't take on the mainstream media alone right now! Blogs are totally outgunned financially and in terms of audience.

But there's no reason at all to assume that things will stay this way. Because what we're seeing is a cultural and economic transition from the hit-driven, passively experienced information and entertainment marketplace to the long-tail-driven, actively engaged information and entertainment marketplace. And the megacorporations are institutionally not well-equipped to take advantage of this, for while they have the money, they do not have the vision. And their corporate cultures are lost in ideas that no longer can thrive, yet are beholden to the interests of a well-fed management that generally has treated content producers with disrespect, if not outright contempt.

It cannot last.

Let's go back a little bit. Once upon a time, television was considered a toy for the wealthy. I have heard enough stories about that day when the Phelps' or the Johnsons got the first TV on the block to make it clear to me that the world was a lot different then.

A lot different.

Flash forward to the 1990s and everyone had a television. Heck, everyone had three televisions! By the time the dot-bomb happened, the only people who didn't have televisions were people who deliberately chose not to have televisions. What once was a luxury item for the upper middle class became a staple item for just about every American's life.

There's no reason to assume that today's blogging demographics will be any different.

To be sure, there are barriers that separate the blogging public from the non-blogging public -- but ultimately they are not economic. I know enough working moms, disabled poor and unemployed students who are blogging to know that the assumptions of an economically-defined "blogging elite" are way off target. While one needs a computer to blog, it doesn't have to be an expensive one. And unless one is of the baby boomer generation, and did not grow up to some extent with computers around, having a computer in the house increasingly is seen as essential -- for shopping, for job hunting, for keeping in touch with friends and family. When you can buy a Dell for $250, and use free blogging software or a free blogging service, the barrier to having the tools to blog is rather low.

And it's not like you have to spend all day blogging. Nearly all the people I know blog in their spare time, in addition to one or two jobs, family commitments and so on. You don't have to be part of the idle rich to blog. So let's just dismiss notions that blogging is done just by "the privileged."

Rather, the dominant demographic distinction is along educational and cultural lines. Let's look at the latter first.

Take television: Today, people are starting to find they don't have as much time for television. And so people try to squeeze it into other parts of their day: in the car, in the shower, on in the background while eating or getting dressed or paying the bills. Once upon a time, some 58% (if memory serves) of the television viewing audience watched the last episode of M*A*S*H. Today no show comes close to that. Not by half. Not by half of half. And it's not just because people are watching more channels. It's because more and more people are finding that they just don't have time to watch.

There's also a new generation now that doesn't watch at all. No news, no cartoons, no sitcoms, no Law & Order.... The TV sits there, turned off, unused. They don't want to watch. They'd rather be online. Or gaming.

The other main divide between bloggers and non-bloggers, I believe, is education -- and while that to an extent can be proscribed by economic class, it's not impossible to obtain. In fact, those fortunate enough to have gone to a competent high school probably learned how to write well back when they were learning how to drive well. (Me, I couldn't write a coherent paragraph until my last third year in the state university, and I got two tickets for speeding and one for rolling through a stop sign before I turned 18.)

The format of blogs today is the written word. And let's face it, you have to have at least some education to communicate in writing. If you can't write what you mean, then blogging probably won't work out too well, because nobody will understand you! (And if you podcast or vlog, you need to be able to competently put the piece together, which also takes some technical and/or learning skills -- in addition to communication skills. And, of course, you'll have to have "it" -- that compelling presence that makes people want to listen or watch.) But education can be obtained, and it's an area where the poor can out-perform the trust-fund babies.

Yet given these economic and cultural barriers to blogging, it may seem to some that blogging is doomed to marginalia in the media realm. But these barriers to blogging are going to fall, and rather quickly. Why? Because while blogs will almost certainly morph -- into visual and aural communications in addition to textual -- one thing will not change: the interactivity of (what we call) blogging.

On the web, people interact. People find their voices and express themselves -- which is a far cry from the common television experience. Bloggers are not couch potatoes. Bloggers do not sit back and watch whatever is on. Bloggers do not sit passively through commercials. Bloggers choose.

It is the active, interactive, decisive way of getting information that defines blogging more than stereotypical notions of Joe Bloggs sitting at his computer in his PJs. And it is the active, interactive, decisive way of connecting with the world that is just starting to sweep through the media world today.

I would go so far as to say that there's no way blogs -- or what blogs become -- won't transform our society. They're already transforming our culture. And while the mega-media companies are the big players today, and still dominate, in the end they will have to adapt or die, because times, they are a' changin', and they won't wait for nobody.

Yet Chaundhry's analysis remains plodding in the present:

But many like Daou remain skeptical about the power of blogs to directly impact politics at the grassroots level. “You’re not going to go out there and mobilize a million people and have them all come to the polls and donate money. Blogs will never do that,” he says

And they may be even less effective in areas that are traditionally not as internet-savvy as the rest of the country, be it the rural red states or impoverished inner cities. Creating a virtual “community center” is unlikely to compensate for the Democrats’ disadvantage on the ground. Due to the eroding presence of unions, Democrats no longer possess a physical meeting place where they can target and mobilize voters—unlike Republicans, who rely on a well-organized network of churches, gun clubs and chambers of commerce.

"Never" is a word rarely proven true. And viewing blogs through the lens of today's economy and today's demographics is a mistake. We do not stand at the end of time. Our society is changing incredibly rapidly. And the old paradigm of hierarchical authority presenting information from the mount will gradually fade away to a world of lateral networks, interconnections and multilateral conversations. What that eventually will look like, who can say? But it won't look like Fox News or the Washington Post.

In Editor and Publisher, Jennifer Saba reports that, if you count online readership, the oft-reported newspaper circulation decline is nothing but an urban legend:

If you count Web traffic, newspapers are actually more popular than ever.

Many readers feel they no longer want to get their hands dirty reading the newspaper, but they are still viewing them online. But this raises the question, how many are uniques, and how many are duplicate readers who also check out the print edition?

Speaking for myself, if I have a print edition of a publication, I seek out the online version only if I'm going to blog about it (and thus want to indulge in some "fair use" snippets).

Still, the newspaper publishers aren't sure what to do about it.

"The harsh reality is, these advertisers are not necessarily looking for total coverage," he adds. "They have a demographic target. That's where the innovation is going to take place and that's where the hard work is."

Take The San Diego Union-Tribune. Using total audience, it reaches 66.3% of San Diego's designated market area. "We have discussed it," says Chris Jennewein, Internet operations director of SignOnSanDiego.com, referring to the total-audience metric. "But at this point, we list both circulation and readership on the print side and page views and unique users on the Internet side." The paper maintains separate sales staffs for print and online.

Although he's in favor of papers trying to combine their Web and print numbers, Jennewein says there are two different markets for print and online: "For most advertisers, it's too cutting-edge. I don't think the parameters have been established yet."

Even papers that have been compiling data to show total audience encounter problems when presenting this data to advertisers. Often, agencies and their clients aren't equipped to manage Web and print buys at the same time.

"The agency structure and the budget process is set up to look at each media individually," says Jason Klein, president and CEO of the Newspaper National Network (NNN). "By and large, this is a case where the sellers are out in front of the buyers."

What it seems like to me is that newspapers may have to go with web advertising strategies that are more like Adsense and less like their own ad sales departments. It's not so much that the sellers are out in front of the buyers as the technology is way ahead of the market. I also suspect that there's some snob-induced blindness going on that prevents the "old media" from seeing and understanding what the "new media" have been doing for some years now. (And it's not just in revenue models: the Cluetrain-less thinking extends to most newspaper websites as well.)

But for me, the real question is not whether the increasingly centralized newspaper industry is going to figure out how to maximize their cash flows -- after all, even with all this suffering, they're averaging some 20% in annual profit. That's a heckuva lot better than even most pharmaceutical conglomerates. What's more important is how the publishing corporations are squeezing their editorial departments, laying off workers and closing news departments even while making money hand over fist. As Michael Massing reports in the New York Review of Books:

It is a striking paradox, however, that newspapers, for all their problems, remain huge moneymakers. In 2004, the industry's average profit margin was 20.5 percent. Some papers routinely earn in excess of 30 percent. By comparison, the average profit margin for the Fortune 500 in 2004 was about 6 percent. If the Los Angeles Times were allowed to operate at a 10 to 15 percent margin, John Carroll told me earlier this year, "it would be a juggernaut."

Back in the 1970s and 1980s, when most papers went public, they had little trouble maintaining such levels. Many enjoyed a monopoly in their markets, and realtors, car dealers, and local stores had no choice except to advertise in them. The introduction of new printing technology helped to reduce labor costs and to shift power away from unions and toward management. But papers have since faced successive waves of new competition— first from TV, then from cable, and now from the Internet. Yet Wall Street continues to demand the same high profits.

In other words, while the newspapers will tell you that their problems are related to declining circulation, the real story -- the one they will not want to tell you -- is that they are still confused by the online world, and that they're being squeezed not by the bottom line but rather by the lofty profit desires of board executives.

Maybe it's not news that green visors and blue pencils don't mix well. But given the rather sad state of news publishing today, one hopes that someone will figure out how make it work. Because while independent media organizations continue to grow, nobody has the resources for in-depth reporting like the teams of experienced journalists and editors employed by the quality papers. And if the media executives continue to march their dinosaurs into the tar pits of unrealistic profit expectations, it could be a long while before there's anything like a viable "fourth estate" again in this country.

On the current nefarious Sony anti-piracy outrage, a column in The Inquirer (UK) by Marc Ninthly highlights what I think is the biggest issue here:

My big problem is that we are not being told about these things. Decisions about the software we run on our systems – the ones we saved hard for, or stole from some drunk yuppie last night – are being made, and implemented without our consent. Now, some legal smart arse will undoubtedly point out that it was all outlined quite clearly in Section 3, paragraph 17, addendum III b of the user contract but let’s be realistic, who the hell reads that all of that mumbo jumbo in the first place? Most real people don’t and when it comes to products from big brands, I often don’t. It’s not just that it’s mind-numbingly boring, but that it’s written in a way to make it impenetrable to normal folk.

One could say that it’s been embedded with an Anti-Interest rootkit that prevents you from reading more than a few paragraphs before you start questioning your own existence. The only way to stop it is to press the ‘Accept’ button. Consumers allocate a certain amount of trust to household name companies when they buy one of their products. We figure, maybe naively, that forking out that extra bit of cash for a real CD instead of some cheapo knock-off at a car boot sale, entitles us to a certain level of quality and protection. Not so. We have now gone from being valued customers to potential criminals. That’s it in a nutshell.

And, he points out, the ultimate consequence of Sony's treatment of its customers is that the customers will be more likely to go the illegal route and download pirated music -- Sony's customers will indeed become the "criminals" that Sony despises.

I'm reminded of a tenet of Eastern thought:

You tend to receive from life that upon which you focus. If you focus on bad things, then you tend to cultivate bad things in your life.

In other words, you reap what you sow. And the "why" is that your creativity is a powerful thing, and works in ways that you don't even realize. Put all your energy into positive endeavors and positive energy comes back to you.

Successful entrepreneurs know this -- they will be the first to tell you how once you commit to a venture, it's almost like doors are opened up before you and the universe conspires for your success. On the other hand, gloomy Murphys will tend to see the downside of any decision; they prove adept at snatching defeat from the jaws of victory.

In this sort of Zen-like way, we're seeing multinational megacorporations focusing on the negative, and therefore cultivating negative outcomes. Sony's corporate policies are being dominated by gloomy Murphys who see criminal intent in every customer. Meanwhile, whatever creative visionaries there might be in Sony's executive suites -- those who might see the new media developments as opportunities rather than threats -- seem to be having little or no impact on corporate decision-making.

The clichéd metaphor of corporate "dinosaur" seems especially apt in this context, for we see a large beast that is so angry that its feeding grounds are changing that its stomping out the food it has -- and seems to be too limited in intelligence to see the self-destructiveness of its actions.

That's not to say I'm predicting the fall of Sony over this. As entrenched as these corporations are in our global economy, it's pretty clear that they aren't going away any time soon.

But this does offer yet another clear indication that the market is changing in ways of which the megacorporations are not mentally, creatively or even lawyerly equipped to take advantage. Our economy is changing, and the old-time top-down hierarchical business models, where the consumer has little or no say in the vendor's business practices, are proving to be outmoded and, ultimately, counter-productive.

Sony is facing an expensive lesson in the new economics of the world. How many more lessons will it take, and how many other dinosaurs will have to suffer the same, before they join us rather than fight us?

Following up on what I just posted, it seems that Sony BMG is now being sued for damage their secret RootKit software has done to PCs:

Sony's now infamous decision to use system destabilizing DRM malware in order to "fight piracy" (despite it being shockingly easy to defeat) has earned Sony a lawsuit or three. A new class action suit has been filed in Los Angeles Superior Court, another is expected in New York this week, and there have been a handful of rumblings in other countries, as well.

In California, the class action suit alleges that Sony's DRM has caused harm to computers, and that the company failed to disclose precisely what the DRM technology would do to users' computers. According to sources, the suit alleges three distinct violations of California law, including violations of statutes relating to deceptive trade practices and obfuscated technological measures deemed to be anti-consumer. The suit seeks an injunction against the sale of the effected CDs as well as monetary damages for those who purchased the discs.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation also is considering legal action and is seeking information from affected customers.

What's more, now the "Stinx-E trojan" has appeared to exploit the Sony DRM software's code to open a back door to PCs.

And not only that, Mark Russinovich reports that the DRM software itself is harder to uninstall than many malicious viruses.

What's even more, Cory at BoingBoing links to Darren Dittrich's report that the Sony CDs also infect Macs:

I recently purchased Imogen Heap's new CD (Speak for Yourself), an RCA Victor release, but with distribution credited to Sony/BMG. Reading recent reports of a Sony rootkit, I decided to poke around. In addition to the standard volume for AIFF files, there's a smaller extra partition for "enhanced" content. I was surprised to find a "Start.app" Mac application in addition to the expected Windows-related files. Running this app brings up a long legal agreement, clicking Continue prompts you for your username/password (uh-oh!), and then promptly exits. Digging around a bit, I find that Start.app actually installs 2 files: PhoenixNub1.kext and PhoenixNub12.kext.

Personally, I'm not a big fan of anyone installing kernel extensions on my Mac. In Sony's defense, upon closer reading of the EULA, they essentially tell you that they will be installing software. Also, this is apparently not the same technology used in the recent Windows rootkits (made by XCP), but rather a DRM codebase developed by SunnComm, who promotes their Mac-aware DRM technology on their site.

EFF has a partial list of infected CDs:

Trey Anastasio, Shine (Columbia)

Celine Dion, On ne Change Pas (Epic)

Neil Diamond, 12 Songs (Columbia)

Our Lady Peace, Healthy in Paranoid Times (Columbia)

Chris Botti, To Love Again (Columbia)

Van Zant, Get Right with the Man (Columbia)

Switchfoot, Nothing is Sound (Columbia)

The Coral, The Invisible Invasion (Columbia)

Acceptance, Phantoms (Columbia)

Susie Suh, Susie Suh (Epic)

Amerie, Touch (Columbia)

Life of Agony, Broken Valley (Epic)

Horace Silver Quintet, Silver's Blue (Epic Legacy)

Gerry Mulligan, Jeru (Columbia Legacy)

Dexter Gordon, Manhattan Symphonie (Columbia Legacy)

The Bad Plus, Suspicious Activity (Columbia)

The Dead 60s, The Dead 60s (Epic)

Dion, The Essential Dion (Columbia Legacy)

Natasha Bedingfield, Unwritten (Epic)

Ricky Martin, Life (Columbia) (labeled as XCP, but, oddly, our disc had no protection)

Several other Sony-BMG CDs are protected with a different copy-protection technology, sourced from SunnComm, including:

My Morning Jacket, Z

Santana, All That I Am

Sarah McLachlan, Bloom Remix Album

They also tell you how to figure out if another CD is infected.

(Now I need to call my sister. I'd bought Santana's album, but didn't care for it and gave it to her. I'm glad I didn't pop it into my Mac first ... but she has a PC. Ack!)

David Berlind on ZDNet notes that the bands whose CDs are being sold with the crippleware are not happy about it:

Z isn't the only band that's upset with the latest DRM developments. Last month, CNN.com reported how a member of the band Switchfoot whose DRM-protected CD debuted at No. 3 on The Billboard 200 was equally disappointed. Said Switchfoot guitarist Tim Foreman, "We were horrified when we first heard about the new copy-protection policy…. It is heartbreaking to see our blood, sweat and tears over the past two years blurred by the confusion and frustration surrounding new technology."

Even more demonstrative of the control points afforded to any market leading or dominating solution, the CNN story goes onto describe how Sony BMG is aware of the problems when it comes to transferring music from its DRM-protected CDs to iPods and is "urging people who buy copy-protected titles to write to Apple and demand that the company license its FairPlay DRM for use with secure CDs." Even though Apple's Fairplay may not have a monopoly yet, the company is behaving very monopolistically, an issue I discuss in another blog entry that I posted today.

Molly Wood's CNET column last week expressed outrage at Sony's behavior:

But this--using the tactics of criminals to invade our PCs without our knowledge and to expose us to further attack, just so you can keep us from, say, burning a mix CD and giving it to our friends--this is beyond the pale. And as many news sources are beginning to point out, there's some reason to think it might also be illegal, under the U.S. Computer Fraud and Abuse Act.

From the realm of unintended consequences, jasonn wonders if anti-virus companies could be prosecuted for removing the DRM software:

The logical question, regarding the Sony rootkit scandal and the upcoming removal tools from antivirus companies, is when will the DOJ prosecute antivirus companies for violating the DMCA? It's not a question of whether or not they violate the law when they supply removal tools for Sony's rootkit, aka Digital Rights Management software, which now exposes PCs to a virus threat. The question is whether or not the government will apply the law.

Isaac.Eiland-Hall is astounded by all this:

I mean really—I can’t imagine they thought they could get away with this.

I tell you what—if I had Sony stock, I’d be selling it like no tomorrow—because that’s what they might have.

Perhaps the simplest and clearest response comes from over By the Bayou:

Nice going. Do they just really hate their customers? As I said before: this is why I almost never buy CDs anymore.

At the very least, I think this is just another demonstration on why Cluetrain-clued-in businesses and open source approaches to technology have bright futures.