I find it fascinating how polarised a lot of the comments are. It's either:
* People will complain about anything. Why be so ungrateful? You don't like it; fine, don't listen.
* How did Apple ever think they could get away with this? It's invading my personal music library.
Fundamentally, it seems that people have very different mental models of what a 'cloud' computing service is. For some people, it's still 'their' music/library, and so this is an invasion. Maybe that's how it should be in an ideal world, but it's not how it currently is. Hopefully, for these people, they'll come away with a better understanding of some of the tradeoffs we make when we decide to use cloud services, even if we don't realise it at the time.
This is probably all made worse because iTunes started as a non-cloud service, but is now some weird hybrid, which is probably why there are such differing attitudes towards it.
I think we can all agree this was a marketing fubar though. A download link would've been much better, and hopefully Apple will realise just how confusing their current set-up is, with even some people who wanted the album not being able to figure out how to get it...
* People will complain about anything. Why be so ungrateful? You don't like it; fine, don't listen.
* How did Apple ever think they could get away with this? It's invading my personal music library.
Fundamentally, it seems that people have very different mental models of what a 'cloud' computing service is. For some people, it's still 'their' music/library, and so this is an invasion. Maybe that's how it should be in an ideal world, but it's not how it currently is. Hopefully, for these people, they'll come away with a better understanding of some of the tradeoffs we make when we decide to use cloud services, even if we don't realise it at the time.
This is probably all made worse because iTunes started as a non-cloud service, but is now some weird hybrid, which is probably why there are such differing attitudes towards it.
I think we can all agree this was a marketing fubar though. A download link would've been much better, and hopefully Apple will realise just how confusing their current set-up is, with even some people who wanted the album not being able to figure out how to get it...