The great double standard

 Yesterday I noted Sony's lack of humor on the subject of Linux and April 1st, but it looks like they are turning into the abominable machine when it comes to going through with their plans. I don't normally go to this length on a topic, but this one deserves a little more than one post. After speaking with Sony technical support both on the phone and through e-mail, I got nothing more than a canned message saying that yes, they will be going through with it. From the sounds of it, they are even insulting the intelligence of their costumers by citing their own Terms of Service. Basically, Sony doesn't really care how many people comment, they're going to do what they want.

 Why would we argue about a feature no one uses? Well, a lot of people do. Even if 99% of fat PS3 users didn't use the feature, that still leaves thousands of Linux users in the dust. I'm not one of the 1% myself, but I had plans to use that feature in the very near future when I beefed up my PS3's hard drive, so who's to say how many people were going to take advantage of that feature eventually?

 It's like owning a copy of Watchmen. Maybe you bought it the second it came out on DVD, and it just didn't feel like something you were willing to devote 3 hours to. So, months later, you decide to pull it out and watch it again with your friends, only to find out that there's a note where your DVD used to be.

 "You weren't using it, so I went ahead and removed it." - Warner Bros.

 The Playstation 3 was advertised as having many features outside of gaming, something that made the black monolith something a lot different from other consoles. Even when the box was released, a lot of the dreamy expectations that even Sony had for it came true. The thing was decked out with Blu-Ray, SD card readers, HD support, Linux support, Bluetooth, and more USB ports than we would ever need. It came with more than we expected, and we certainly never heard the end of it. Linux support in itself was advertised as the one thing that would make users forget that they ever needed anything else in their entertainment unit. Yellow Dog Linux even sold for about $60, and was Sony supported.

 It wasn't until the Slim came out that this feature would be removed, a move meant to put the PlayStation at the magical price point it needed to be in order to push systems out the door and keep profits in the black. Fans didn't necessarily like the removal of Linux, as there didn't seem to be much of a reason to remove it, but there wasn't much to complain about. We really didn't use the feature all that much, and at least we knew that this specific PS3 was not a computer.

 With the fatty, we knew exactly what we were buying. A PS3, a Blu-Ray player, and a computer all in one. That was the advertising, it was on the box, it's in the manual, and Sony made money off of the claim. That's why people have a right to be a little crazy about the announcement, but just because we don't care about something or don't use this feature doesn't mean that we shouldn't be more crazy about what they are trying to say with this removal. Digg It Stumble it ! Reddit