dilemma
I got an email from an old friend this morning, announcing the birth of her baby. Congratulations, Linnea and Curtis, on the arrival of little Rowan. In her email there was a link to the i'm Initiative. I had never heard of it (like I've said before, I can be pretty out of it as far as web trends go) and was interested enough to follow the link.
The basic idea is that when you IM or email, a donation gets made to charity. The charities are good ones, ones I'd consider writing out a check to. In fact, one of them is the Red Cross, to which I made a donation just this weekend. The catch is, this initiative is sponsored by Microsoft, and you have to use their products to participate.
Now, I've never used Messenger or Hotmail, but if Microsoft's other products are anything to go by, I expect they're pretty crappy. So I guess if you can't get people to use your product based on its merits, develop a value-added scheme that plays on peoples' desire to be benevolent.
Microsoft certainly isn't the first one to play this game. Walk through a grocery store during May, and the aisles are packed with pink packages advertising that proceeds will go to Susan G. Komen for the Cure (incidentally, this is one of the charities supported by the Microsoft initiative). The difference I see is that the pink packages exclusively dress name-brand products, which are usually a little better quality than their store-brand counterparts, but also more expensive. So, if you're a store-brand shopper, maybe each May you upgrade to the name brand and soothe your conscience. You capitulate to the value-added scheme, and spend an extra 20 cents on that can of tuna, but what you get is higher quality tuna AND the "added value" of a penny going to charity.
On the other hand, Microsoft's products are free to the user. So in my original decision to NOT use these products, I wasn't balancing cost and quality, but making a selection among available products based solely on their merits. To switch to the Microsoft products would be to sacrifice product quality in the interest of supporting the initiative, and the "added value" isn't really "added" at all, but is merely a feature of the product that allows it to now be competitive with whatever alternate product I had been using.
I will concede that for people already using the software, the initiative is probably a bonus. For me, the idea that for every ten emails I send, half a cent gets donated to charity isn't enough to make up for the evil Microsoft has perpetrated on the world. (Okay, maybe not evil, but have you tried to use Vista? Or open one of Microsoft's "OpenXML" file formats with something other than Office?)
The basic idea is that when you IM or email, a donation gets made to charity. The charities are good ones, ones I'd consider writing out a check to. In fact, one of them is the Red Cross, to which I made a donation just this weekend. The catch is, this initiative is sponsored by Microsoft, and you have to use their products to participate.
Now, I've never used Messenger or Hotmail, but if Microsoft's other products are anything to go by, I expect they're pretty crappy. So I guess if you can't get people to use your product based on its merits, develop a value-added scheme that plays on peoples' desire to be benevolent.
Microsoft certainly isn't the first one to play this game. Walk through a grocery store during May, and the aisles are packed with pink packages advertising that proceeds will go to Susan G. Komen for the Cure (incidentally, this is one of the charities supported by the Microsoft initiative). The difference I see is that the pink packages exclusively dress name-brand products, which are usually a little better quality than their store-brand counterparts, but also more expensive. So, if you're a store-brand shopper, maybe each May you upgrade to the name brand and soothe your conscience. You capitulate to the value-added scheme, and spend an extra 20 cents on that can of tuna, but what you get is higher quality tuna AND the "added value" of a penny going to charity.
On the other hand, Microsoft's products are free to the user. So in my original decision to NOT use these products, I wasn't balancing cost and quality, but making a selection among available products based solely on their merits. To switch to the Microsoft products would be to sacrifice product quality in the interest of supporting the initiative, and the "added value" isn't really "added" at all, but is merely a feature of the product that allows it to now be competitive with whatever alternate product I had been using.
I will concede that for people already using the software, the initiative is probably a bonus. For me, the idea that for every ten emails I send, half a cent gets donated to charity isn't enough to make up for the evil Microsoft has perpetrated on the world. (Okay, maybe not evil, but have you tried to use Vista? Or open one of Microsoft's "OpenXML" file formats with something other than Office?)
