What happens when your message isn’t congruent with your actions?

I just got around to installing Windows 7 (an absolutely terrible operating system if you do anything more than email and web browsing) on one of the workstations at the office and I needed to read through a PDF document but didn’t yet have Adobe Reader installed. I know Adobe Reader is a slow piece of bloated, bug-ridden nonsense and thought it might be time to look for alternatives. Googling around I find out about Foxit and have heard good things from a few people so thought I would give it a quick whirl.

And I got slimed.

Installing the software just feels like a nasty, slimy experience as you click through all of the “No, I don’t want a new toolbar. No, I don’t need you to re-write my homepage bookmark. No, I don’t need eBay stuck on my browser either.” By the time I hit the “would you like us to stick bookmarks to trusted websites you already have in your browser?” I was done and it was time to stop the install process.

The wording of each option is very forked tongue. I had flashbacks to the 1990’s with the beginnings of the Internet and my first encounters with “behind your back, let me fuck your machine up” software installations. AOL strangely comes to mind. The phrasing of each option is done in such a way that you either aren’t sure if you need the toolbar for the software to work, whether you’re turning it off, turning it on, or are just asking to be bent over and taken without any kind of lube.

Okay, let’s stop this installation. Yeah, but there’s no “Cancel” button, no “Back” button. Another incongruity. ”We’re so convinced you’ll love our software and all of the bloat that we bundle with it that we don’t need to provide you with the option to cancel.” I quickly decide to bring up Task Manager and just kill the install process before this goes any further.

Here’s someone else who had the same issues with the software installer I did. http://www.vitalsecurity.org/2009/05/why-i-flushed-foxit.html

The marketing message states one thing, the actions of the software, and the company behind the software, are clearly something else.

So what other products does the company behind Foxit produce and sell?

I don’t know.

I don’t care.

I will never find out because through a single experience of dealing with a slimy piece of software that left a bad taste, I won’t ever consider using any of their software in the future.

This is what happens when you have an incongruent message, you switch off your potential customers. You destroy a future relationship.

How much money are you making by bundling distasteful practices in to your free software, to make a quick buck? You louse up potential future sales because the user is no longer interested enough to look at what other products you create.

At least with Adobe Reader I know how to turn off what I don’t want and the registry patches you need to apply are clearly documented on various websites.

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Perhaps I am just being overly sensitive to this but I have noticed that there is a prevalence of late for website sign-up forms to ask for not only the usual information such as a user name, but the ever ubiquitous and completely useless date of birth and now, this week, your gender! And it isn’t just optional either, it is mandatory. You will have a gender, damn it! Yahoo! Mail, Google, Skype, SightSpeed, Windows Live, and at least two popular social bookmarking sites and a Firefox plug-in all have a mandatory “gender” field.

Why do you need to know my gender? For marketing purposes? I don’t want to be marketed to. For sales analysis by your staff? That benefits you, not me. So you can uniquely identify me? Choose something else. My personal details are my own to reveal not yours to own.

I find being forced to reveal gender, sexual orientation, date of birth, or most other details about me, involuntarily, is an annoyance and offensive. And I am not the only one I am sure.

The information I divulge is entirely up to me, not you.

Requiring name, date of birth, or gender does only two things, it pisses me off, ensuring I won’t be giving you my business, and if I do go to all the trouble of informing you of this information, you now have a polluted database because I just signed up with completely false details showing that I am a female Doctor/Baroness/Sir born on January 1st 1901 who loves the movie “Go fuck yourself!”* whose first pet was called “And your dog!”

I love telling people in customer support at my bank that one when they ask for my secret pass phrase so they “verify my identity.”

Customer Support: “And to whom am I talking to right now?”

Me: “Justin Lloyd. The account holder.”

Customer Support: “You’re a man.”

Me: “You are very observant.”

Customer Support: “Can you verify your date of birth for me?”

Me: “Yes, January 1st, 1901.” (or whatever earliest date that their dumb computer system will take)

Customer Support: “And can you answer the question, What is your favourite movie?”

Me: “Go fuck yourself!”

*pregnant pause*

Customer Support: “And how may I help you today Baroness Justin Lloyd?”

The moral of the story is, if you are in business and in the habit of collecting data to benefit you, you’re an idiot and your data is worthless.

* Actually I use an equally interesting, equally childish but completely different “favourite movie” now.

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I can finally talk about our latest project — "Shrek The Third" for Microsoft Windows. I’m happy with the way the game turned out and made me realise that perhaps there is a market for casual "platformer" games after all.

The game has been approved by Microsoft and Activision and all of those people that matter and we’ve added it to our portfolio of titles. The movie is out on May 18th so we will all be attending a screening of it as a company outing.

With our current office expansion underway and the year not even half over we are planning on having two more projects out the door by the time that Christmas rolls around. I’ll post more when I am able to talk about them.

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