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?]