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Consumer Friendly Downloads?

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on from the bigger-friendlier-corporations dept.

* * Beatles-Beatles writes to tell us Yahoo and AOL will be offering a new anti-spyware initiative to begin next year. The new initiative will allow vendors to get their software "certified" as easy to remove and not containing spyware. From the article: "It creates market incentives that will change how consumers see software," said Doug Leeds, Yahoo's vice president for product justice. Backers of the initiative believe that consumers wouldn't benefit much from a system in which good products simply display seals of approval. "They are looking for us to do it for them," Leeds said."

2 of 169 comments (clear)

  1. Submitter is a link spammer, does /. care? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    Am I the only person who has noticed the numerous stories that get posted by *--Beatles-Beatles? Am I also the only person who has noticed that the link used in is name is a constantly changing URL (depending on the story) with pointers to various scammy sites? Is it not obvious what he's doing? He's using the awesome PageRank of slashdot do promote his sites based on searches that have the word Beatles in them.

    It's a small price to pay for free advertising. Find a story, summarize it in 5 minutes, post to slashdot, and get a pagerank boost that advertisers would pay hundreds (or maybe thousands) for. (Text links on high-ranking sites is big business - just ask oreilly).

    Slashdot should at least put a ref=nofollow in the links to submitters (or better yet, only link the submitter's name to his/her user page).

  2. Small business owners will pay, though. by lwagner · · Score: 5, Informative
    Way back in March, Slashdot carried an article saying Office Depot will only carry Windows XP approved software. I also think a big company only supporting a few software titles (and probably charging a bit to do it) is bad too.

    Ah, my friend, but you forget that is for for small business owners such as myself who couldn't care less about the variety of software -- we just want our stuff to work. Do you know how much time I spend playing "IT Guy" for our company? It is truly not fun.

    Give us our MS-Office, our devices that plug in correctly, our specialized apps, and just make everything work. We'll pay extra.