Criticism
The Microsoft Points system has been criticized for being deceptive in terms of actual real-world cost, as well as for users often having to purchase more points at once than are immediately needed. In his review of the Zune, news editor for Windows IT Pro Magazine Paul Thurrott mentions:
"Microsoft is obscuring the true cost of this content. A song on Zune typically costs 79 Microsoft Points, which, yes, is about 99 cents. But it seems to be less because it's just 79 Points."
The Wall Street Journal technology reporter Walter Mossberg notes:
"To buy even a single 99-cent song from the Zune store, you have to purchase blocks of 'points' from Microsoft, in increments of at least $5. You can’t just click and have the 99 cents deducted from a credit card, as you can with iTunes. So, even if you are buying only one song, you have to allow Microsoft to hold on to at least $4.01 of your money until you buy another."
Read more about this topic: Microsoft Points
Famous quotes containing the word criticism:
“Unless criticism refuses to take itself quite so seriously or at least to permit its readers not to, it will inevitably continue to reflect the finicky canons of the genteel tradition and the depressing pieties of the Culture Religion of Modernism.”
—Leslie Fiedler (b. 1917)
“Of all the cants which are canted in this canting world—though the cant of hypocrites may be the worst—the cant of criticism is the most tormenting!”
—Laurence Sterne (1713–1768)
“Cubism had been an analysis of the object and an attempt to put it before us in its totality; both as analysis and as synthesis, it was a criticism of appearance. Surrealism transmuted the object, and suddenly a canvas became an apparition: a new figuration, a real transfiguration.”
—Octavio Paz (b. 1914)