* Conditions Apply
You know that what you are saying is false but still you can prove yourself true, that’s the magic of marketing and its favorite buzzword “* Conditions Apply”
I posted about Reliance Data Card - Free 10GB for 12 months offer by Vriti. This offer is visible as sponsored listing or ad Google search results for many of competing wireless broadband/internet providers and would have attracted a lot of people only to feel cheated later. Though this is a false offer but can be proved true when “* Conditions Apply”
I checked the official site for Reliance Netconnect for the tariffs and found two offers.
Choose any plan of your choice and get:
- Free rental for the first month
OR
- Monthly discount of Rs. 200/- for 12 months (worth Rs. 2400/-) on any monthly rental plan above Rs. 1000/-
The first offer for Free rental for first month is obvious and can save from Rs.299 to 1750 depending on plan you choose. Let’s check the second offer.
The minimum plan above Rs.1000 is Rs.1050 (rounded) which gives you free usage of 3GB during daytime and 10GB during night. If you go for this plan and choose to avail Rs.200 discount for 12 months you will end up paying Rs.850 (rounded) each month.
Now if you go through the tariff chart you will also find a plan for Rs.850 which provides 3GB of Free usage (daytime & night combined). So when you choose 1050 plan, you pay only 850 and get free usage of 10GB extra for night compared to 850 plan. This proves that “Free 10GB for 12 months” is true*
*Conditions Apply
- You need to go for 1050 plan for which you pay Rs850 per month. Free 10GB is extra usage you get compared to 850 plan
- Free 10GB has to be used during night time.
So when you go for a purchase next time insist on being told what all “conditions apply”. This buzzword is there to hide some facts from you until you demand to be told. Once you demand, you will be told just one of the hidden conditions hoping that you will be satisfied and will not ask for next one. Keep asking “Is that all?” and one hidden condition at a time will come forward since they can choose to keep away from telling truth but cannot tell a lie and hiding facts when you ask “Is that all?” would be telling a lie.
Just a few days back a Standard Chartered Bank representative met me in person with offer for Free* Credit Card and my “Is that all?” ended up with a shocking revelation that “If the card is not used once within 30 days of issuance, a penalty of Rs.250 will be imposed” How many of you knew that such a conditions exist? In effect this means that if you get a credit card the Bank wants you to use it. The more you use the more are chances that you miss payment on due date giving them chance to impose penalties which is actually their prospective source of income from the Free* card that they issued to you. Next time when you are called for Credit Card just ask them that you also need to open a Savings Bank account too so that you can avail facilities as auto-payment of credit card dues, you will be deviated and ultimately denied help in that matter.
Be cautious and always demand to be told the conditions that apply.
Will Internet Explorer 8 bring back IE’s lost Browser market
Internet Explorer 8 has crossed the Beta stage with Release Candidate 1 being made available to public. If no serious flaws are found in this release, the next would be the final release. It’s being reported that Internet Explorer 8 is better than IE7, so does it mean that it would be instrumental in recovering IE’s lost market share?
When Internet Explorer was released it started as a competitor to already on top Netscape Navigator. Aggressive marketing strategies kept on raising its market share until it became the king of browser market with over 94% share around mid 2004 when it started declining.
Were competitor browsers responsible for decline of IE’s market share or it was Microsoft’s own decision to end the war? I feel it’s the latter. Whether it was an intended decision or was outcome of overconfidence, Microsoft decided to decline, by declaring in 2003 that Internet Explorer would no longer be standalone applications but major versions would be released only with the new versions of Windows Operating System. So while Internet Explorer 6 was the default bundled browser with Windows XP, and IE7 default browser for Windows Vista, Internet Explorer 8 RC1 has just been released when Windows 7 is nearing its finish.
You may think that despite declaration of not releasing IE as standalone apps, they indeed continued to release installers for IE as they did for IE7 which many users installed on Windows XP systems and now for IE8. The fact, however, is that these installers are not standalone applications as they are too sensitive to Operating System configuration. While other browser may have their minimum requirement for Operating Systems, IE’s minimum requirement is specific to minor updates. For example take the current IE8 RC1 release, which has a dependency on a minor update (KB932823) which according to linked page says “Install this update to resolve an issue in which a user is unable to use Windows Internet Explorer 7 to download files on a computer that is running Windows with IME enabled.”
Since my installation was a fresh XP SP2 installation with only those updates installed which were required for Windows Live Writer, I decided to go ahead with automatic downloads and the installation failed! Should we call this a standalone application which cannot stand-alone and fails for want of a 400KB update which could have easily been added to its already heavy size of 16MB without much ado?
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When I already have Opera, Chrome, Firefox and Safari installed on my system (ordered according to my usage pattern), would I care for IE after such failures? I would not, leave for one reason that I wanted to have a blog post on it’s usability compared to the other 4 as mentioned above. So I decided to give it a few more moments and made the updates manually completing the installation and got the greeting message “Welcome to Internet Explorer.
Do I look like diverting from the title “Will Internet Explorer 8 bring back the lost Browser market”? No! I’m coming to the point! though the installer for Internet Explorer 8 RC1 is available for download and anyone can download it, the 400KB update mentioned above that needs to be downloaded manually goes through online Product Authentication check ,and pirated copies of Windows OSes are bound to fail the check and will require to live solely on Firefox and Chrome. This necessarily means that Microsoft clearly means to exclude the section of users living on pirated versions of Windows OS and give away that piece to its competitor browsers.
In any case it’s unlikely that Internet Explorer will ever regain its market share considering that now there are comparatively many competitors each trying hard to beat others and in process slicing off another piece of IE’s share. What are your views? Eagerly awaiting those in comments.
The Blog Revisited – 3
Beginning of January saw posting of Tweaking Registry for Internet Explorer that turned into most viewed post on this blog. Internet Explorer (4 and above) allowed a lot of customization, a few of which are listed here.
The Blog Revisited – 2
MSXML component provides you with everything that you need to read,parse or write an XML file However when you write an XML file the file contains no indentation etc to make it readable. While working on code to introduce indents in an XML file I wrote a general component to do it easily which is described in Easy way to writing XML.
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