Full Disclosure: Tech Companies to You, 'Hello, Sucker!'

Stephen Manes

If anybody keeps a tech-company brazenness index, it has to be heading straight off the charts. Take this little gem among recent dialog boxes: "RealPlayer is not the default player for one or more supported media types. Would you like to correct this?"

"Correct" it? There's nothing wrong here unless you happen to be a RealNetworks shareholder. True, RealPlayer's shameless effort to become your computer's default media player is by no means unique. Apple's QuickTime, Microsoft's Windows Media Player, and other programs try to do it too, and their attempts can cause havoc with system settings. But RealNetworks is the only vendor I've seen that implies your PC's current media associations somehow amount to an error. And that misleading statement says plenty about how Real sees you: as a sucker who doesn't know better.

I run across this attitude so often in the Web world that I constantly keep my guard up, but Real is a real doozy. At this writing, clicking on the "Check it out!" button on Real's home page takes you to a page where you can buy a copy of the new RealOne player--and speaking of brazenness, Real wants you to pay for a beta version. But from the evidence on the site, you'd never know that a free version existed. To find it, you have to click on links lower down on the page, spot a "free player" button in gray text on a gray background, and then avoid accepting a "free trial" offer that will eventually result in a credit card charge unless you phone the company to cancel. Once again, Real plays you for a sucker.

Nothing new there. Real has long used creative ways of hiding its attempts to put you on as many of its mailing lists as possible. My favorite was the clever window that showed several boxes you could uncheck, but hid others unless you knew enough to scroll down to catch them, too.

Tricksters of the Trade

Doesn't all this amount to a bad way to do business? Why would you ever buy anything from a company that treated you this way unless it had a monopoly? Luckily there's still competition left among media players--even if some of it comes from a monopolist called Microsoft.

Still, Real's attitude is hardly unique. Every spamster on the planet thinks that you're dumb enough to fall for a too-good-to-be-true offer from some clown you've never even heard of. Every Internet retailer who delays calculating the total cost of your order until you've surrendered your credit card number figures you'll have invested too much effort to back out. The in-your-face way Microsoft's Windows XP nags you to sign up for Passport and MSN is a symptom of the same worldview: The customer is a chump.

Ever-more-brazen online ads treat you like an even lower form of life. Lately I've been fighting pop-up and pop-under windows that don't have close boxes. The only way to remove them is to press Alt-F4--a trick most users won't know, and one that doesn't always work. It's getting to the point where you may have to reboot your PC just to get rid of an annoying ad.

Companies that heap contempt on their customers are not confined to the digital world. But it's especially repulsive when an outsider's message or software commandeers a machine that's supposed to be yours. Businesses that refuse to step lightly in our PCs may discover that treating customers like chumps makes for fewer customers, period.

Contributing Editor Stephen Manes, a cohost of the public television series Digital Duo, has written about PCs for nearly two decades.