Amazon decided to advertise its new Cloud Drive for music (Did I miss something? It’s a big network storage thing, right? Why is this so much more awesome than any other way of uploading my files somewhere?) by selling Lady Gaga’s new album for $0.99 today. That’s right, you can buy “Born This Way” for $0.99 at Amazon or for $15.99 at iTunes. No brainer, amirite?
Holy. Jee. Zus.
I bought the album on Amazon. The Amazon MP3 Downloader started up and told me it’s downloading the album…without filling in the bar that tells me how much it’s downloaded. I guess it downloaded one song, but on the very next song it said: “Download failed; retry download.”
Um. Okay. How do I do that?
There is no handy “Retry” button in the toolbar. There is no “Retry” menu option. I opened the Amazon MP3 Downloader help file and searched for “retry”: the word doesn’t appear anywhere in the help.
I have no idea why it’s not downloading my album. I don’t know where to go to retry or to restart this process. The choice in the toolbar is “Pause Download”, which I don’t want to do — I want it to finish the damn download.
On the next couple of songs, I’m getting the error message “Can’t connect. Check your Internet connection and retry download.” I know perfectly well my Internet connection is just fine. And I have downloaded music for Amazon before, so I have no idea: has something changed and I’ve forgotten to push some button? Are their servers getting slammed with purchases and the only available error messages blame me, the user, for their services faults?
I’m not a naive user of computers. I know plenty about how to use them. But how much energy do I want to invest in learning every single method of how to do things, especially when there are already incredibly intuitive ways that are standard on the Mac OS? That Amazon has chosen not to do this, has in fact made it hard for me, speaks volumes. They definitely have the book download process sussed out, but they have ways to go on building a media empire.
If I had given $16 to Apple, I would have my damn album already.
(In addition, it turned out that initially I had an old version of the Amazon MP3 Downloader. Um, okay. It asks me if I want to update and I say yes…and I get kicked over to an Amazon web page, where I need to click another button to download a whole ‘nother installer, which will then update my application. This is not how Mac applications do it, guys. You hit a button, and it all magically happens in the background. I don’t have to pay attention to web pages or get extra buttons. This has been a deeply frustrating experience.)
Easy is hard.
I can’t get the Amazon download tool to work with Chrome (on my Mac) at all. I got the same “retry” errors – I’m guessing it was overload on Amazon’s side, since I’ve never gotten those before.
Apparently everyone in Christendom was having those errors yesterday. Amazon offers one of the most anticipated albums of the year by the biggest star today for 99 cents and isn’t prepared for what happens? That’s just amazing epic fail. Welcome to the big leagues, kids: the water’s kind of warm, you better bring your floatation devices.
The real problem, for me, is not even that their servers were slammed so hard they couldn’t keep up (although for a company who’s betting BIG on being your source for all cloud-based-everything, that’s just…bad), but how awful and unhelpful the software is. It’s poorly written, poorly designed software with a terrible UI.
Seriously, Amazon, not all software UI designers live in Cupertino: you can hire some elsewhere. You just have to hire them earlier in the project and incorporate what they say from the beginning. Is that so hard?
I have no comment on Amazon’s cloud debacle.
But, I’m the woman mentioned in the previous post about the freakiness of the Internet and how I know you friend Nina. All of my general connectedness comes from my husband. He works with several guys who went to school with Nina’s husband. We are also very good friends with Don Louv, who used to work with your husband ages ago at Apple. And, my husband worked for WebTV (that’s where we met Don) so there’s the Steve Perlman connection (didn’t Darin work for General Magic?). Oh, and we also knew CJ Silverio because she worked for WebTV, too.
Really, I am not a weirdo stalker or anything. But, yeah, it is probably a little weird.
Hahahaha — no worries. It’s just weird how lines of connection keep crossing in this area.
Darin did indeed work for General Magic.