A Franchise on Mediocrity February 26, 1996 Every time I crank up Netscape Navigator and randomly scope out strange new sites on the Internet, I can't help but reflect on the fact that more and more profound, bizarre, and twisted pages are cropping up every day. Some are interesting, some are disturbing, and some are just inane. However, when I need a shot of mental cotton candy and some computer industry news-in-brief, I hop on over to the URL http://www.cnet.com.C-Net has built itself an Internet advertising franchise by providing uninspired news reports, stale columns, and me-too style reviews that would embarrass even industry slaves like PC Magazine. Most of their features are hardly cutting edge, one notable example being the seemingly interminable lifespan of their Internet browser torture test/ongoing Web browser review. They also have a mesmerizing Java news-ticker that I can't see on my Mac. By creating a site with flashy design and snooze-along content, they seem to have attracted the least common denominator of Internet-users, consisting mainly of people who happened to catch their ever-so-hip television offering, C-Net Central, and America Online users who just figured out how to escape the land of keywords and fire up AOL's antiquated web browser. C-Net, not content with providing some of the least sanguine reporting on the Web, decided to up the ante and bestow the net with a yet another facility for downloading Shareware. No, it's not an anonymous FTP site, in fact you can't actually download software from C-Net themselves at all. Like the Lite Beer ads of the 80's, Shareware.com seems to invite comparison to its competitors according to the mantra, "Same Great Taste, 1/3 Less Filling!". Shareware.com is, of course, a vehicle for accruing advertising revenue. The attraction to consumers? A site where you can download popular shareware titles. Not exactly what you'd refer to as a top consumer attraction. When it comes down to brass tacks, the bottom line is that Shareware.com provides a hotlist (not unlike the one that ships with Anarchie) of well established ftp sites who have been providing this service for quite some time. In a weak attempt at a value-add, they do you the service of rating the reliability of each site, which is hardly useful given the fact that if one of the sites doesn't respond, you can just click on another almost instantly. Given the domain name, you would think that they are providing a service to the shareware authors themselves (in addition to trying to turn a quick buck through penny per hit advertising), but they fail to serve notice that you're supposed to actually pay for shareware at some point. Given that C-Net's niche market is apparently "idiots and/or newbies on the Web who had the misfortune of tuning in our television program," it seems like they would state somewhere that the concept of shareware is try it before you BUY IT. This statement is, however, notably absent, in fact they make no effort to describe the shareware concept anywhere on their site. I think that my attitude toward this near-useless site would be radically different had they done something really useful and provided their users with an online facility for registering shareware using secure transactions over the Web. By providing such a service, they could truly spur the shareware industry with their notariety and easy accessability, but this function seems to have escaped them. Instead they contribute to the morass of computer users who don't pay for commercial software, much less consider actually registering a package that they can legally download. The fact is, if Shareware.com didn't enjoy plugs all over C-Net's own web page and their previously mentioned 30 minute Internet gossip column/infomercial that airs in my area every Saturday, there wouldn't really be any good reason at all for people to even bother typing in their URL (not that I believe many people type it in, I imagine most people get there through the ubiquitous online advertising). Please don't take this article the wrong way. If you enjoy reading the news on C-Net, by all means go ahead. Apparently about half a million other people decided that registering as a C-Net user is a "good thing", so at least you're not alone. If you think that Shareware.Com is the coolest way to find and download software on the 'net, I don't want you to report somewhere for reeducation either. Just remember that mediocrity survives because people like you pay for it. |
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