2006 February 02

Best Buy Hates Non-PC Users

I don’t really think Best Buy Company (BBC) hates non-PC users, but I’m stunned that a mainstream retailer like BBC does not support web standards and thought I’d put in a provocative headline.

In typical short-sighted fashion, I discovered this evening that BBC’s Reward Zone program only supports Internet Explorer 5.x and above if you want to print off the rewards you signed up for and earned through purchases. You have a Macintosh? Tough. Linux box? What…are you some kind of geek loser? If you are the geek loser, just reboot in to Windows and use the insecure Microsoft browser, willya?

Wait a minute though. How about the discontinued IE 5.2 on Macintosh? Not supported. OK then, how about on the slowing, but still fast growing IE alternative, Firefox? Nope.

So BBC apparently doesn’t want a material share of the market to participate in their loyalty program. They’re walking away from the roughly 5% of the PC market that Apple represents as well as the >10% share that an alternative like Firefox represents. How is this somehow OK to BBC information technology management? (Even to the outsourced to Accenture I.T. leadership?).

Most importantly, how does this fit in to BBC’s “customer-centricity” effort?

[Read more...]

Filed Under: Commerce

Video distributed everywhere!

Let’s see…we’ve got iTunes, Google, You Tube, vSocial, Veoh and dozens of others in the video distribution game already…and now one of the broadcast networks (CBS) is getting in to it too.

Oh great…yet another place to go to find content. Another subscription. Another log-in. More fees. Enough already and we haven’t even started! But is there already a better way?

Om Malik discusses Mary Hodder’s new startup, Dabble, which is setup to be an aggregator of video content and more. Here’s the amusing thing: when I first read about Mary’s startup on Om’s blog, I chuckled to myself and thought, "Why in the world would I want an aggregator for video? Certainly one or two companies — like what happened with satellite DirecTV and DISH — will become THE dominant distribution hub."

I now see the opportunity. The ‘net will bring us a finite, yet enormous number of distribution points for moving images. Perhaps multiple mass distribution hubs and, eventually, narrowly focused ones will appear. Until then (and for quite some time), there will be a need for aggregation. I intend to do more investigation to discover if — in Mary’s startup — I’ll be able to aggregate content and turn around and publish my own aggregated feed. Now THAT would be powerful.