Ah, there’s nothing better than passionate users. The Wall Street Journal recently ran a holiday poll asking "Which of these items are you most likely to purchase as a gift?"
The iPod and Zune were two of the choices and when the final numbers had been tallied, the iPod received 62% of the vote and "in a highly improbable move, Zune surged from less than 1% through most of the polling to 28% at the end."
Something smells funny, right? Apparently an affectionate Zune fan wrote an autovoting script only to be later matched by a similar script from the iPod side of the fence. The result?
"When I left my house Thanksgiving morning, the Zune had 241 vote to iPhone/iPods 63,415 votes. Pretty lopsided I must say. Well, someone went and ruined any credibility this poll had by creating an auto voter for the Zune. I won’t share the link since I think it’s embarrasing that someone has so little respect for this poll that they would ruin it by skewing the votes. Basicly this auto voter opens up in your browser and begins spamming votes for the Zune.
Now, 16 hours later, this poll has 169,554 votes. What is even worse is the fact that it would seem that someone also created something similar for the iPhone/iPod seeing that the numbers have jumped from 63,415 votes to 377,766 in the same time period."
Can’t we all just get along? I find this humorous but that might be because I’m not an all-in supporter of either device. Apple and Microsoft, however, should be plenty pleased to know that they’ve created passionate users on both sides.
It should also be noted that poor BlackBerry got 0% of the votes. Where are all the rabid mobile productivity fanboys?! Have your secretaries write an autovoting script next time!
Zune People Cheated, but so did iPod People… [Got Zune?]
“Where are all the rabid mobile productivity fanboys?!”
We’re too busy enjoying our all-in-one iPhone :) Who cares about iPods or Zunes.
Apple is out of the game.
I’ll be surprised if the company even exists five years from now.
I can tell you it was Apple fans who incited the cheating first. Have you seen the MacDailyNews http://macdailynews.com/index.php/weblog/comments/15587/P50/ ??
With comments like, “you know what to do.” can you blame Zune loyalists getting a little mad when over 60,000 came in after that article??? It was only a response to people already cheating….
Oh yes, quite sad that people don’t “respect” the poll. Seriously, this is how online polls work. You want a serious survey, go somewhere else.
@Jimi: I actually largely agree – about the iPod. But that’s only one part of their business. The Mac remains far superior to any other computer right now. As long as that continues, I don’t think they’re going anywhere, whatever happens between the iPod and the Zune.
@virvirex – Are you kidding me? Macs? Superior to any other computer? LOL.
I don’t even know where to start… The most powerful computers on the market are PC’s.
virvirex & LPX: Where have you guys been for the last 2 years? Don’t you know that Macs and a vast majority of PCs use the same EXACT hardware…
I know LPX, high end quad SLI, AMD, 1000w power supplies, etc., there are a lot more options on the PC side.
OS preference… That’s really all it is now. But you guys knew that, right?