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Nero - WHY?

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Lashiec:
Welcome to another edition of "Beating a Dead Horse", this night the program will revolve around one of the audience past favourite programs... gone wrong (and you know how people love to see heroes in the mud), the ever present Nero Burning ROM (or whatever it's called now)

OK, everybody knows what immensely bloated suite Nero has become since version 6, and how people still use it in a great percentage due to inertia (just like they use Real Player, Adobe Acrobat or iTunes), and that free license you get with every DVD writer that is available in the market. OK, despite that, Nero, as a burner, is still a very decent program, and as such, some of its shortcomings can be ignored. Like the fact that, even if you can disable the installation of most of the shovelware that brings along, the program insists on installing Nero Scout (barf!), or all those video decoders, WITHOUT asking. At least you can disable them, and they don't take over the computer, unlike some other video players.

What it can't be forgiven is how shitty is to update *something* in this trainwreck of a suite. Not only Nero did combine ALL the languages available in a single installation package, ending up with a > 300 MB file, but they also decide to release the help files in a separate RAR archive to reduce the size of the distribution. And imagine my reaction when I see that decompressing them in the default locations does absolutely nothing, and calling for help in most applications of the suite brings up the default help file, telling me to download the help package. Exactly that one: "Wow, what a mess"

You may argue that Nero provides its own update system, and this is the final thing that drove me nuts, and made me forget about Nero until they fix their ways. First, you have to check to updates, and once you know there are updates available, the program checks again! WTF? All of this with a big banner of Nero 8 in front of your face. So, you start updating, for what it needs to configure the Windows' Firewall, because it blocked the connection (what? the firewall did not say anything, and I already added the program to the exception list), download files for God-knows-what-engine, and then you start the update, which usually weights between 40 and 80 MB (if you update often that is).

But wait! In the last two updates, Nero prompted me to uninstall the previous version, which is typical as you may know. So, I accepted the dialog, waited for the program to do its job, and rebooted the computer. The update continued afterwards. And this is when everything breaks. I was doing some other things meanwhile the setup ended downloading the files, and installing everything, but the installation phase was taking too long, like 10 minutes, and there was no sign of activity anywhere. I launched Process Monitor, and confirmed my suspicions, nothing was going on. This is the second time that it happens, and the last as well. Bye, bye, Nero, I tried to give you an opportunity, but you really wanted to be kicked out of the door.

It's a shame, really, there are very capable people working in Nero, like the guys in charge of the Nero AAC encoder, or Erik Deppe, the sole programmer of Nero DiscSpeed, the burner is still quite good IMO, and some of the best tools of the suite are being available for free, but the program crumbles under its own weight, the rest of the applications are poor excuses and suck hard compared with the competition. It does not help that programs like CDBurnerXP or ImgBurn are far more capable that Burning ROM, with tons of options for power users, much less footprint, and free. I suppose Nero would continue its own path, until it comes to a RealPlayer situation, and tries to reverse it by doing too little and too late.

Tune in next month to see if it's possible to find a less obnoxious alternative to Adobe Reader, OpenOffice and QuickTime (it there's no broadcast, that means they're not obnoxious enough)

Carol Haynes:
Interesting comment ... personally I haven't updated to version 8 of Nero (can't see the point) and I can't see my self ever upgrading again unless they offer a simple 'lean mean burning ROM only" option - which is extremely unlikely.

I do have Burning ROM version 7 installed (and wish I had stuck with version 6 and not bothered upgrading then) AND ImgBurn AND AShampoo Burning Studio.

Strange thing is I keep coming back to BurningROM. I get far fewer coasters with it and I can do most things more quickly - especially if you want to build DVDs. ImgBurn doesn't really support building disc contents in a nice way (in fact it is pretty awful and doesn't produce compliant DVD video discs from a VIDEO_TS folder) and AShampoo's offering is not much better.

Even when I do have an ISO file I find I get fewer bad burns with Nero than I do with ImgBurn - especially with Dual Layer DVDs (which are expensive to waste). I don't know why - never been able to figure it out.

Personally I would like to see the back of Nero on my system - I hate the massive downloads for updates, and the annoying installation/uninstallation/reboot nonsense - but it does work and does pretty much everything you need in a burning app.

Incidentally I have non of the other Nero apps installed and disable Scout as a first course of action after installation.

I just don't understand the Nero mentality - why take THE most popular burning app and turn it into a ridiculously over the top bloatfest? They must realise that they are alienating lots of long term users. Presumably the profits from the mindless people who buy the upgrade simply because it came with their computer and think "OOOO Look at all this nice video/picture stufff " (which they will never ever remeber they have got after running it once). Presumably they felt they had to compete with ROXIO - but does anyone even use ROXIO any more - I haven't heard of them in years.

Presumably Nero will start losing out as users become more savvy - let's hope they have the sense to sort things out before they end up down the flusher .... the mind boggles.

lanux128:
Not only Nero did combine ALL the languages available in a single installation package, ending up with a > 300 MB file, but they also decide to release the help files in a separate RAR archive to reduce the size of the distribution. And imagine my reaction when I see that decompressing them in the default locations does absolutely nothing, and calling for help in most applications of the suite brings up the default help file, telling me to download the help package.-Lashiec (June 23, 2008, 07:14 PM)
--- End quote ---

hehe.. good old times. i fell for it too, diligently downloaded all the chm files and put in their respective folders only for Nero to bug me big-time. ;D

CWuestefeld:
I agree with everything you've said, but...

As counter-examples, consider Lotus 1-2-3, or PKZip. Both of those programs essentially defined their genres, and it was unthinkable that they could be dethroned. Yet they rested on their laurels so that today those programs are all but forgotten.

To remain a leader in your segment you must continue to innovate. Some companies have done this, correctly anticipating customer desires, and surfed the wave to ongoing success. Photoshop has broadened its scope to graphical tools that would surely have been outside of its original mission. MS Office has done the same, albeit with choruses of "bloat" along the way. But in these cases, much of the bloat has evolved into must-haves in their genres.

I suppose that it's a matter of correctly anticipating the needs/desires of your target market. Nero had the right idea at version 6, but let it carry them away in subsequent versions. Acrobat was a good idea, but bloat made it unwieldy and their over-aggressive marketing led to its use for really inappropriate tasks, and made folks like me hate it.

But if you can see that your image editing users need a light table, or that people editing documents could use change tracking, you may be ensuring your ongoing success.

f0dder:
Humm, ImgBurn works well with VIDEO_TS for me, at least movies burnt that way play on my standalone Philips player. I dropped using Nero when I realized that it consistently made bad burns. Not coasters, no, a lot more devious: it made burns that gave horrible read speeds, but other than  that worked just fine. No idea how they pulled off that trick.

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