So I bought a Motorola Q9c from Sprint back in February. It is, without a doubt, the worst phone I’ve ever owned. Oh Motorola Q9c, how I hate thee, let me count the ways:

• Since March 2008, it’s been bricked at least 3-4 times. Thankfully a hard reset resolved the issue each time but no after losing a bunch of settings.
• Windows Mobile blows. It’s like Windows 3.11, just a bit prettier
• The camera takes decent shots. But its slow.
• The menu system sucks.
• When the battery dies completely, you need to have a Motorola charger. You can’t just hook it up via USB and let it charge.
• Too bad a third party software company makes a better software for syncing on the Mac than anything available on Windows. That’s pretty damned sad.

Now I’m stuck with the phone for the next two years and i want to get rid of it completely. I’d sell it and get a new one but I would pity the poor fool who buys it.

You have to love the French government - a modern country frozen in dark-ages mentality. However the precedent the French are attempting to set with this case is dangerous. Since eBay is largely a community of buyers and sellers, holding the mechanism responsible is just beyond the reach of the rational.

Fake goods are a plague for brands; a boon for those who could care less. However eBay never takes posession of the goods in the marketplace. It is not an escrow service for buying and selling and has no business verifying authenticity of goods on the site. While some may disagree, the responsibility lies with the person who sold the merchandise to the buyer. Imagine if we held the government up to the same standard. Any illegal activity taking place on the street would logically be the government’s fault. If drugs are illegal and sold on the street, the government would then be the sole party responsible for the sale of illegal drugs.  If someone were to die from taking a fake drug, the dealer would essentially remain free and the government would be levied with the burden of carrying the debt.

While I am, by no means, privy to any information in the case (see ‘About’ for disclaimer),  I do question the logic of the French court system. There are generally two outcomes that will arise: eBay will most likely be sued in French courts by others who are attempting to “protect” their brands, and consumers will face a backlash as the goods (real or fake) begin to disappear.

How is this good for consumers? It helps to clamp down on fake goods. How is it bad? Since eBay has no real ability to validate whether goods are legitimate, it may force the removal of legitimate luxury goods. Forget selling that Louis Vuitton hand bag you bought from the retail store on eBay. If eBay is the one holding the liability for those goods, do you really think they want to face lawsuit after lawsuit from these brands?

If there is one thing I hate about watching TV, it’s watching TV on the Internet. No bones about it, most major media outlets continue to get wrong what they can’t get right over the airwaves.

Commercials: bathroom breaks for some, pet peeve and bane to others. So why do larger media outlets think that their vision of video on the Internet is no different than that on the airwaves? This type of thinking will only lead to overall failure; failure to gain and retain viewers; failure to get marketshare; failure to provide anyone with any service that is worth spending time watching.

On the top of my pet peeve list is  those video sites that use Windows Media. Of course, I’m a Mac and Linux user so I can have some gripes with it. However To view video on the Mac, I need to download flip4mac which has its own “quirks” to say the least.

But back to advertising. I’ve gone to watch videos where the first 15 to 30 seconds of the video is an advertisement. Thanks for wasting my time and making me watch another dumb Microsoft commercial trying to sell me on the wonders of Word. A 30 second advertisement and a 2-3 minute video is a worse experience than watching live TV. Way to go… Way to leverage all the wonderful power that technology has given us by making the entire experience worse than what it was. Hopefully the post office won’t go back to using horse-drawn mail delivery.

Mass media execs have entirely missed the Internet boat. It sailed by them a long time ago. Is it really any wonder why people will spend a few hours watching videos on YouTube? Is it, aside from the dork factor of watching other people do stupid things, because the content is short, to the point, and generally entertaining without being draining?

I often wonder how many marketing execs would take a radio script and put the entire script up as print ad in a magazine or newspaper. It would generally be boring to see nothing but huge blocks of text and they would be mostly ignored. Good advertising is alluring within the media format it is designed for. Internet TV is not the same as “regular” TV (and I include cable), but that has not stopped marketing execs from applying one script to a different medium.

While I’m hardly one to pick on the business world and corporations, but for the bucks many of these institutions are paying for highly trained MBAs and/or consultants, very few of them have the wherewithal to think outside of the rectangular box (with a power cord).

A Java IDE vendor promoting their wares with:

“JCreator is written entirely in C++, which makes it fast and efficient compared to the Java based editors/IDE’s.”

Oh the irony.