You Can’t Suck Enough

If you’ve had some sort of tech issue, I’m sure you’ve happened upon experts-exchange.com hits in Google which (I’ll be optimistic here) more often than not had some modicum of a solution for you to said tech issue.

It’s always been a bit dicey (people asking for homework solutions, assholes as experts, etc.) but it’s held up for a while. Hell, it started this whole Answers industry that Amazon and Yahoo have sunk their own teeth into. And, clusterfuck answering of questions theoretically can net you a true and realistic answer (just like all those monkeys writing Shakespeare). But, here’s the clincher…that was true as long as it was free.

Now, from what I’ve read, the company behind the sexpert’s exchange (expert sex change.com) went belly up and sold out to another company that sees walls plastered with c-notes in their future.  The funny thing is, I was logged in and able to see solutions through until just a few weeks ago.

I “rebuilt” my machine (spankin new HD) recently and went through that wonderful ritual of trying to figure out what I forgot to back-up/copy before I had to start over (fuck you Microsoft and the registry your OS rode in on).

So, I did a search for something stupid I needed an answer for and landed on an experts-exchange.com page. Beauty…seems someone else had the same problem and–what’s this? I can’t see the solution? Oh, right, need to login. Okay, let’s try the usual culprits…no dice. Forgot password. None of the possible e-mail addresses I could’ve given over to these idiots work. Hmm.  Well, what the hell…my handful of expert points probably didn’t amount to more than a potato chip of value so I thought I’d just sign up again.

BAM. Seven day free trial. Sorry? Seven days? You mean Seven Days A Week Free Trial, right? Nope. Seems I either had been slipping through their impenetrable wall of greed for months (I guess people’ve have been dealing with trial issues for a year now…wow) or they decided to pick this week to finally turn off the spigot completely to tech yokels like me.

Thing is…with the search that got me to their site, I got another 98,200 results from Google. Let’s see…pay money for a site with “experts” that are more like the average joe than real experts or just search for other sites with the same solution via Google. Difficult choice.

Experts Exchange…you really can’t suck enough.

Tags: Experts Exchange

This entry was posted on Friday, March 13th, 2009 at 22:07 and is filed under Bad Business Model, Greed. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.