Replies

I’m glad to see that Penton heard the reaction of so many of your subscribers and determined to do the right thing.

Kathleen,

I’m glad you read the posts here in the Lounge, and that you have addressed, if unsatisfactorily, many of the concerns expressed.

However, you have not addressed the elephant in the room: the dishonoring of WS’s commitment to the lifetime subscriptions.

It really can’t cost much to honor them, since I would bet that you will lose well over 3/4 of the lifetime subscribers once you start trying to charge them for what they already bought and paid for.

Does Penton really think it can convert former lifetime subscriptions into new paid subscriptions?

Is the ill will generated by the action really worth it for Penton?

I note that the Windows Secrets Subscription Preferences pages still shows the Privacy Policy that states:

[*]We will never sell, rent, or give away your address to any outside party, ever.
[*]We will never send you any unrequested e-mail, besides e-mail communications regarding the Windows Secrets Newsletter, newsletter updates, or announcements for new products or services we might develop.
[*]All unsubscribe requests are honored immediately, period.

If that policy changes, we must be given advance notice, and a chance to “immediately, period.” unsubscribe.

I remain very unhappy with the changes to the newsletter (now merely a digest) and the dishonoring of the lifetime subscriptions. Bad faith all around from Penton.

Your point that the use of “can” is inaccurate is absolutely correct. The new owners have made a CHOICE not to honor the obligations of the previous owners.

Without having seen the documents surrounding the acquisition (and without knowing the form), it’s not clear to me as a mergers & acquisitions lawyer for over 30 years how the obligations of the lifetime subscriptions were handled in the transaction(s). In most transactions, regardless whether the form is an asset sale, merger, stock sale, etc., the obligations of the seller are assumed by the buyer. Sometimes, specific liabilities are excluded, and the seller indemnifies the buyer against them. So, what’s happened here is not clear – did the buyer negotiate an exclusion for the liability associated with the lifetime subscriptions? That would mean that while third parties would still proceed against the buyer, the buyer would look to the seller to pay the cost of any lawsuit or any judgment. That would mean the sellers intentionally sold us all down the river, betting no one would do anything about it.

The alternative is that the issue was not discussed and the liability passed to the new owners, who have cynically decided no one will try to enforce the obligation, since each individual has so little at stake. Of course, that’s why class action lawsuits were invented. There are lawyers who make their entire livings by bringing class action lawsuits against entities that figure no one will do anything because the cost of asserting their rights is too high individually.

I note that Penton, the new owners, is a privately held company, owned by Wasserstein & Company/MidOcean Partners — an investment banking firm and a private equity firm. Windows Secrets is pretty small beer in the whole scheme of things for the ultimate owners, but you can bet that some mid-level executives bonus (or perhaps even continued employment) depends on better monetizing (as the phrase goes these days) the intellectual property which Windows Secrets represents.

If it’s expensive enough to kill the lifetime subscriptions, they won’t. If they think it’s cheaper to kill them, they will.

I’ve been a lifetime subscriber for several years … I don’t even remember how long….

I am really angry that you will not be honoring the promise made when I purchased the lifetime subscription. I’m sure there are many of us in the same position, probably thousands.

Perhaps a class action lawsuit on behalf of all the subscribers who are harmed by the proposed new policy would help you rethink your position. I’m an attorney – not a litigator, but I know plenty of them, a few of whom are technology addicts since the ’80s as I am, and I’m sure at least some of them might well be more than happy to do well by doing good holding your feet to the fire.

What’s worse, the lifetime subscribers were your most loyal – the ones who laid out money when Windows Secrets needed it and supported Windows Secrets growing into what it has become. I’m willing to bet that if you don’t honor the lifetime subscriptions fully, you will lose over 3/4 of the lifetime subscribers.

Is that really what the new owners want? Sometimes, when prices increase, revenue actually decreases. That even happens with taxes: those who can (which in this case is every single subscriber), tend to leave if they don’t like the increase.

I knew that something bad was up behind the scenes when Woody Leonhard cut his ties and the windows secrets lounge was no longer linked on “Askwoody.com”. I’ve known (in the ether) and followed Woody’s work since the early days of Windows and its programs, beta tested various software and had many educational and enjoyable exchanges with him in the various test fora in the ’90s. He wouldn’t walk away lightly, and he was very discrete about why he left, but now we know.

This is a year later, and I have a related question. I’m a lawyer using office 2010 heavily. I have resisted Office 2013 because I frankly saw no compelling reason to upgrade. I like to own my software generally, and do not want to depend on having internet access to use my software.

But, I also increasingly use an iPad for reviewing and some document mark-up, like many of us. Now that Word is available for iPad, it seems that to have full functionality with iPad Word, I need an Office 365 subscription. I’m willing to pay up for that, but I don’t want go to a rental version of my main Office program and still don’t know of a compelling reason to go from Office 2010 to Office 2013, unless I will have to in order to use the various office apps on my iPad and Office on my laptop.

Can you advise me here? Can I stay with Office 2010 on my laptop (Win 7 pro, 64bit) and have iPad versions of the Office apps with Office 365 without causing installation, compatibility, functionality or other unanticipated problems? Thanks in advance!

Rob

Sorry to have stopped, but the behavior was insane. It’s abated for now, but…. The mouse is wireless, but plugged in. The only wireless devices (other than the router) nearby are my iPhone and iPad. I did disable the touchpad on the the T420s, which seems to help sometimes.

I also have a phenomenon that when in the dock, I have to boot the computer two or more times before it really starts. It hangs on the Thinkpad screen the first time, sometimes the second or third. I have the external monitor and a couple of external drives and speakers attached, so I assume it’s somehow related to them, but unclear. Sometimes I have to ‘clear’ the T420s by undocking it and removing the battery(ies – if I have the ultrabay battery in, which I do sometimes).

All very odd. I can’t get into the recovery program because I’ve lost my windows password and always get in with my fingerprint reader…. argh. I’ve been doing computers and networks for more than 25 years now, but I feel like a complete tyro….

That’s fine where optimum provides services, but not in most of the country, or abroad.

The problem is I have a work e-mail that I want to keep using that is through a domain I own that I manage through their sitemail. Not sure how to get around that, and I simply don’t trust google with my e-mail.

Thanks for the insight. I will contact my ISP and see what they can tell me. It’s annoying if that’s the problem, since they’re otherwise a very good ISP.

Thanks – I had tried that with the plug ins, but it turned out to be the Thinkvantage Password Manager 3.0. Grrr.

Forgot to add: Running Windows 7 Professional on a Lenovo T420S with 8G RAM

Just so. I suspected it might be something like that, but it was worth asking to find out if MS had made it possible to do with the ‘special’ shortcuts. I presume this will work for the rest of the Office programs….
Thank you very much for the quick reply.
s’funny… I’m a newbie more or less on this forum, but go waaaay back with Woody to the early ’90s when he was first doing the power pack and beta testing various software… especially a precursor of Outlook called Packrat. Something of kludge, but it worked well with Winword 2.0. etc.

Thanks for the tip on the Installing pdf!

Hmmm, I’ve been having major problems trying to get itunes installed on my new Lenovo T-420s win7pro64, 8G ram – I tried uninstalling and reinstalling, but that is consistently unsuccessful. I uninstalled and completely cleaned everything out using jv powertoosl registry cleaner and followed apple’s instructions for completely uninstalling
I keep getting the following error:
Problem signature:
Problem Event Name: BEX
Application Name: iTunes.exe
Application Version: 10.5.0.142
Application Timestamp: 4e9243f2
Fault Module Name: MSVCR80.dll
Fault Module Version: 8.0.50727.6195
Fault Module Timestamp: 4dcddbf3
Exception Offset: 00026b72
Exception Code: c000000d
Exception Data: 00000000
OS Version: 6.1.7601.2.1.0.256.48
Locale ID: 1033
Additional Information 1: aec1
Additional Information 2: aec178c4debdc54fae8bafc6bd84621d
Additional Information 3: 7696
Additional Information 4: 7696eb266721b0f3efdd5c932aadd6a6

Read our privacy statement online:
http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?linkid=104288&clcid=0x0409

Any thoughts?