I was at the Users in Charge session of BloggerCon IV the other day led by Chris Pirillo (Dan Farber has a good write up here). Good topic, though I had hoped it was going to be more about how users can insert themselves into product development versus how it turned out: (mostly) complaining about specific applications / hardware. As a developer I was supposed to sit quietly and listen . . .
Anyway, in the spirit of that session, here is something that really drives me crazy: I use Dragon NaturallySpeaking. The company that sells this is Nuance. They sell some other products. I don’t want them. I don’t want emails from them about these other products, but I do want upgrade information for Dragon. It appears that I have to get emails about all of their products to learn about upgrades. Not so uncommon, but annoying.
I have easily seen 100 of these emails over the years. Certainly irritating, but not that big a deal. I don’t bridle at this like some do. Apparently this isn’t enough though, they have integrated these offers into the Dragon self-update feature. So every once in a while I get a dialog box that pops up. Presumably, it is checking for updates (i.e., bug fixes) for NaturallySpeaking. Even when it doesn’t find any, it tries to sell me other products.
Can I update without self-update? No, that isn’t actually possible. Can I turn off the promotions in self-update? I can’t figure it out.
What does the user-in-charge do? Complain, certainly. Stop using the product? Not upgrade next time? Maybe.
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