Has CNET taken over EVERYTHING???

Sheesh! It seems like everywhere I go that ugly-ass CNET logo is there, usurping the place of a brand that I used to have some respect for.

I just tried to go to versiontracker.com and instead I’m redirected to ‘download.cnet.com’. A bit jarring.

I remember when they took over MacFixit.com and changed that to ‘reviews.cnet.com’. Man that sucked. It felt like the end of an era.

Now to be perfectly honest, I have no evidence that the actual information is compromised in any manner, mostly because I’m so offput by the CNET brand that I go elsewhere. They must be doing something right to have gotten as large as they have, though.

Check out this pop-up that you see when you first get there:

cnet popup
The pop-up window you get when trying to browse to versiontracker.com

So they’re trying to assure people that the quality is still there. What’s strange to me is that CNET is so bent on swallowing up the other brand that has recognition and trust from users and then eliminating the benefits of that by rebranding it to CNET, which is usually regarded to be a generic and not especially remarkable brand.

I seem to recall them just placing the CNET logo above the site’s specific logo and having it state something like “MacFixit: A CNET site” or similar.

They should just leave it at that, because while I don’t think the CNET brand is particularly bad, in my mind it does not stand for excellence and is not somewhere I’d choose to go to get info or software. CNET is such a 1990’s website. It has the weight and money, I guess, but it doesn’t have the mindshare anymore. At least it doesn’t have mine.

CNET seems like a monolithic spam site to me most of the time. Even though there are times when you end up there from a search, it’s not usually a site you start out with to get info. I’m definitely not looking to frequent “download.cnet.com” to find software, I feel like I might get a virus from there. I’m not talking about my machine, either. I’m talking about me physically getting a virus from CNET.

Anyway, I’m not sure how long versiontracker.com has been “download.cnet.com”, but it feels like the end of another era. If I need to find specific software now I guess I’ll just stick with Google or Bing. That’s right, the OTHER monolithic companies apparently hellbent on controlling everything.

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