When Walmart announced earlier this week that it was about to shut down its music servers and leave customers swinging in the wind, I wondered if the mobs start gathering their pitchforks and torches. It looks like they did.

From Boing Boing:

After announcing that they’d be shutting off their DRM servers and nuking their customers’ music collections, Wal*Mart has changed their mind. Now they’ve told their customers that they’ll be keeping these servers online indefinitely — which means that they’ll be paying forever for their mistaken kowtowing to the entertainment industry’s DRM mania.

All those companies (cough Amazon cough Apple cough) that say they’re only doing DRM for now, until they can convince the stupid entertainment execs to ditch it, heed this lesson: you will spend the rest of your corporate life paying for this mistake, maintaining infrastructure whose sole purpose is to lock your customers into a technology restriction that no one really believes in. Welcome to the infinite cost of doing business with Hollywood.

The fact that they were pissing some reasonably savvy techies might have had something to do with it. Walmart.com probably would not survive a revenge attack.

Jeff Hess: Have Coffee Will Write.

This entry was posted on Friday, October 10th, 2008 at 1116 by Jeff Hess and is filed under Citizen Groups, Customer Satisfaction. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.