So, I tried to find this song I wanted on MSN Music today. I know, I shouldn’t be using it, but seeing as I don’t have an iPod and I don’t live in the US, it’s actually my only choice. The funny thing is that when I opened the site, innocently awaiting the familiar front page, I get the following message instead. “You do not have access to MSN Music. You need the following to access this web page…”. Now, this usually doesn’t happen to me when I browse, and so when I saw this message, I felt my pulse starting to race, worrying if there is something wrong with my beloved computer, or even worse, something wrong with the Internet. As my eyes race down the page, desperately searching for a solution to this sudden and brutal dismissal, I suddenly notice a point on the page. As the truth sinks in, I’m not sure whether to be relieved, irritated or just laugh.

For your information, you need the following to be able to access MSN Music: “Internet Explorer version 6.0 or higher”. No, not just a browser, for example Internet Explorer, but IE itself, in all its superior glory (notice the subtle irony). That reminds me of the recipes that used to be on the back of various food items, which went something like this: “For this cake you will need 100 grams of flour and 200 grams of this specific butter”, and conveniently enough the butter was produced by the same company that had made the product with the recipe. What are they trying to say, that if I use the wrong butter my cake will blow up because of incompatible elements? What are these people trying to achieve?

Yes, I admit that I did open up IE to view MSN Music, but I’ve already closed it again, and you can bet that I’m a thousand times more motivated to switch to iTunes now. Now, in general, the people who have IE and don’t use it have a very good reason for doing so, and I don’t think anyone will download it just to view one web site. I would really like to know what the makers of this site were thinking, but then again, how people who work at Microsoft are thinking seems to be one of the great mysteries of the universe. At any rate, they won’t be getting any cake from me anytime soon, which is sad, because their baking machines are probably busy telling people to use intermilk explorer when they add the milk.

This entry was posted on Friday, April 27th, 2007 at 11:40 pm and is filed under My life, Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.