For that matter, I have to gripe about MS some more. I use a Pocket PC and wanted to search for news yesterday. As soon as I directed my browser to MSNBC.COM, it immediately took me to a “pocket PC friendly” site. No problem there except that you can’t read any of the news – just the headlines and you can’t even search.
To make matters worse, I tried to see Ken Levy’s email letter: http://msdn.microsoft.com/vfoxpro/letters on my Ipaq. Where did it take me to? A “Mobile device” friendly page that wouldn’t let me read the letter.
I have no problem with web sites that offer friendlier views of the same information but DON’T LIMIT what I can look at.
As a result for my news search, I ended up going to CNN’s web site.
Now, don’t tell me that the PocketPC is an “old-hat” product, blah, blah, blah. Yes, I know more resources are going into the TabletPC (which as far as I know still can’t be fit into a pocket) or into the Smart Phone (which is effectively PocketPC on steroids). The point is that if they want to promote these technologies as viable, they have to STOP limiting what people can access with them. Tell them it may not look right (and allow me to turn that warning off) but let me get to the information I want to see. (in some ways, technological censorship of this kind is worse than real censorship because you aren’t being TOLD you can’t access the information – you’re just left to feel it’s simply not important.)