Fun with blog stats, and saying goodbye to U3…

Well, apparently my disturbing popularity as a top hit for removing U3 software from Sandisk (and other) thumb drives is at an end, which amuses me highly. Now this blog is back to what it was meant to be, a quiet little place for me to rant; 200+ hits a day on a post I wrote a year ago is a little ridiculous, but it goes to show how much trouble the damned thing made for so many people. Not that I minded folks looking for it, but since the next-highest post had about 20 hits a day, I found it rather entertaining.

But just for kicks… it’s been around 300 days since I wrote that post, and the average number of hits per day from around the beginning has been about 100. Even if you presume 30% of those hits were from people who absolutely love U3 or who were looking for something else (and I think the roughly 200 negative comments on the post indicate that’s probably being pretty generous), that’s still about 20,000 people who thought U3 sucked. You got that, SanDisk? Since this blog, right now, has just under 40,000 hits, that means that most folks who’ve bothered to come to my quiet little corner of the Blogosphere came here to find a way to get rid of your software…

What’s really funny is that the stats drop happened all at once. Like, Monday, it got 202 hits (pretty normal, lately). Tuesday: 56 hits. Wednesday: 28. All at once, I tell you …

Perhaps the U3 guys got annoyed and decided to try to do something about their search rankings Alternately, WordPress changed its stats counter again. (Or insert your own hilarious conspiracy theory here! )

Either way, I couldn’t care less – I do think it’s rather amusing that these guys got bitten for their bundled, involuntarily installed software that apparently messed up a lot of people’s systems.

But as a farewell to U3, I thought I’d give all you U3-haters a treat that my husband sent me a few weeks ago via Slashdot. Apparently there’s an Information Week article stating that Sandisk will abandon its U3 technology in favor of a partnership with Microsoft to “carry a complete image of their desktops around in their pockets.” From the article:

As part of the plan, SanDisk will phase out its U3 technology, which adds some smart features to USB devices. Independent software developers that have created U3-compatible applications will be offered help migrating their products to the new technology, which has yet to be named.

Now, I don’t know that the resultant Microsoft/SanDisk product will be any better – but it will probably be more clearly advertised, since these guys seem to want to make money specifically off of the technology rather than stealth-bundling (and yes, I do think that showing the “feature” in small print on an unbelievably cheap drive is stealth-bundling).

I’m not any more likely to buy one of these guys than I am to intentionally use U3, but I do have some advice for Microsoft and Sandisk this time: either let users install the new software themselves, or give them a very clear reference to how to get rid of it if they don’t want it. Preferably, if you preinstall your software on the drive, you should include the removal software with the disk and let users decline anything that might be installed on the desktop from the get-go, and give them the option to uninstall your software from the thumb-drive the first time they plug it in.

If you can’t do that, don’t advertise it as a thumb drive. People have certain expectations for what thumb-drives do, and screwing up multiple systems by installing software and messing up drive settings arbitrarily on every computer they touch isn’t one of them, unless they’re infected with a virus. Package it instead, in big letters, as a “Windows-only desktop replication device”. With a big warning that it will screw up your CD-ROM drive settings for no apparent reason. And possibly eat your dog when you’re not looking