Don’t get me wrong. I love some of their audio products, and I recently had one of their cameras that I can say nothing but nice things about. But there’s something terribly wrong in the minds of their computing products division. The root kit thing was pretty bad, and it made a lot of people I know boycott Sony altogether. Today’s revelation makes you wonder whether they really learned their lesson from that experience.
As any Windows computer buyer will tell you, most computers (Sony included) come with a vast assortment of “trial” software or — as some people call it — bloatware. Uninstalling it can be time-consuming, tedious, and sometimes in certain cases, almost impossible.
Sony has introduced a service called “Fresh Start” that is available on selected series of Sony laptop computers. For FIFTY ADDITIONAL DOLLARS, they will install LESS software on your computer.
I’m gonna pause here, so you can go back and read that last paragraph again.
Sony defends this service fee, saying that there is labour involved in removing software from laptops before shipping. It doesn’t hold water though. Any geek worth his salt knows they will just make another disk image without the trial software. No amount of money (or Sony propaganda) can convince me they actually uninstall the software. They just don’t install it in the first place. The delivery dates for normal and Fresh Start laptops are identical.
Sony really needs to pull an IBM and sell-off that division. They’re steadily plotting a course to being trusted even less than Microsoft.
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