Germany's national anthem sponsored by Acrobat, Apple, Microsoft and Nullsoft?

Unfortunately, it's true that people have no clue what they're doing with their computer and that they *do* freak out when encountering something they don't know (e.g. ogg wtf?)

This *is* the status quo, but it can and should be changed.

The approach of keeping things stupid-simple is similar to talking dummy-language with a foreigner instead of "the real thing". How should someone learn to deal with the world if noone shows them?

...I think mk is right, and it should be the government's job to play a role model (since they *should* know better than "clicking on the blue internet..." ;-) )

I think one reason for this is that the average web user (no offense) is not computer literate enough to understand sentences like "download the anthem in Ogg Vorbis format and play it in your favorite audio player".

To most people, "a media player" does not mean anything, and neither does "a browser". If you tell them "open the page in your browser" you get blank stares. If you tell them "go to the blue little Internet" everything's fine. You wouldn't believe how many people don't know that web sites have addresses nowadays. They enter things like www.something.com in Google and then use the first result! I once tried to tell a lady that she can also enter http://mail.somecompany.com directly in the address bar, she got very angry at me and said "but I ALWAYS use do it this way!", so she cheerfully keeps entering addresses in her Google search box. If this had been a single occurence I would have put it down to individual creativity, but our hotline deals with this exact problem at least once per day -- and we only have 3000 users.

So saying "open your WinAmp" or "open your Windows Media Player" simply works better than saying "use an audio player you like".