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:
“The aim of all commentary on art now should be to make works of art—and, by analogy, our own experience—more, rather than less, real to us. The function of criticism should be to show how it is what it is, even that it is what it is, rather than to show what it means.”
—Susan Sontag (b. 1933)
“Homoeopathy is insignificant as an art of healing, but of great value as criticism on the hygeia or medical practice of the time.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“The critic lives at second hand. He writes about. The poem, the novel, or the play must be given to him; criticism exists by the grace of other men’s genius. By virtue of style, criticism can itself become literature. But usually this occurs only when the writer is acting as critic of his own work or as outrider to his own poetics, when the criticism of Coleridge is work in progress or that of T.S. Eliot propaganda.”
—George Steiner (b. 1929)