There is a point at which advertising crosses the line. Microsoft has passed that line by a mile.
I am generally a very liberal minded person when it comes to advertising. I believe advertising can be successfully and sensibly implemented within schools in order to balance out costs of expensive products like computers. While some may draw comparison between my ideas and Microsoft’s recent Bing campaign, there is one major difference. Mine would look like advertising. Thus lies the reason why Microsoft’s Bing campaign is so morally apprehensible.
Bing is Microsoft’s search engine, and search is easy money. Search engines make money through advertisements. Those advertisements are labeled for what they are: ads. Here’s why Microsoft’s campaign is morally wrong: they haven’t applied this same principle to their middle school campaign. Microsoft has gone into a middle school teaching young children a catchy (and frankly awful) song and dance about their search engine. While dancing around in their Bing T-shirts, watching videos about Bing and singing Bing songs, their minds are being moulded and shaped using techniques they don’t recognize as advertising. Their being fed ads that don’t look like, and aren’t labeled as, ads.
It’s using the plasticity of a child’s mind to shamelessly push a product. It’s clear that the children are oblivious to the tactics of the Redmond giant and that they are being brainwashed, which is what makes this so wrong. If you are going to advertise to children, do it in an honest and obvious way. Advertising could be used to lower education costs, to bring technology into the classrooms of children who otherwise couldn’t afford it and would live without it. What this has reinforced in the minds of those against advertising is that the industry can’t be trusted to be sensible when dealing with children, when with the proper oversights it could be.
Microsoft and the middle school have lowered the bar of advertising, and it will take a lot to raise it back up.
Wow.
11:32 Oct 13th, 2009 | Notes
T-MOBILE AND MICROSOFT/DANGER STATUS UPDATE ON SIDEKICK DATA DISRUPTION
Dear valued T-Mobile Sidekick customers:
T-Mobile and the Sidekick data services provider, Danger, a subsidiary of Microsoft, are reaching out to express our apologies regarding the recent Sidekick data service disruption. We appreciate your patience as Microsoft/Danger continues to work on maintaining platform stability, and restoring all services for our Sidekick customers.
Regrettably, based on Microsoft/Danger’s latest recovery assessment of their systems, we must now inform you that personal information stored on your device – such as contacts, calendar entries, to-do lists or photos – that is no longer on your Sidekick almost certainly has been lost as a result of a server failure at Microsoft/Danger. That said, our teams continue to work around-the-clock in hopes of discovering some way to recover this information. However, the likelihood of a successful outcome is extremely low. As such, we wanted to share this news with you and offer some tips and suggestions to help you rebuild your personal content. You can find these tips at the T-Mobile Sidekick Forums (http://www.t-mobile.com/sidekick ). We encourage you to visit the Forums on a regular basis to access the latest updates as well as FAQs regarding this service disruption.
In addition, we plan to communicate with you on Monday (Oct. 12) the status of the remaining issues caused by the service disruption, including the data recovery efforts and the Download Catalog restoration which we are continuing to resolve. We also will communicate any additional tips or suggestions that may help in restoring your content.
We recognize the magnitude of this inconvenience. Our primary efforts have been focused on restoring our customers’ personal content. We also are considering additional measures for those of you who have lost your content to help reinforce how valuable you are as a T-Mobile customer.
We continue to advise customers to NOT reset their device by removing the battery or letting their battery drain completely, as any personal content that currently resides on your device will be lost.
Once again, T-Mobile and Microsoft/Danger regret any and all inconvenience this matter has caused.
- T-Mobile letter to their customers after all the information on their cellphones was permanently deleted. Forever. Gone. Kaput.
This has to be one of the biggest cloud computing disasters in the history of the internet. For background, the T-Mobile Sidekick is a cellphone which stores nothing on the device. Every bit of information is stored on T-Mobile’s (Microsoft’s) servers. Every photo, contact, calendar, everything is stored on the web. So to get this letter saying that every one of the 800,000 Sidekick users’ data has been permanently lost, with little to no hope of recovery is astounding.
This also comes as a huge blow for the cloud computing industry, who didn’t need this sort of event to happen just as they were gaining consumer trust that their technology is safe and reliable.
But seriously, wow. Microsoft, the largest computing company in the world, just lost 800,000 peoples’ information. The best part: they didn’t have a backup of any of it. Hypocrite much? As TechCrunch puts it, it’s beyond fail.
ChromeOS and Why Google Won’t Succeed in the OS War
7:52 Jul 13th, 2009 | 0 notes
Look at the laptop market ten years ago. What do you see? You see Windows dominating the PC arena, a Mac OS that isn’t anywhere near its current glory and a Linix base still wondering why people aren’t using it in the masses. Essentially, you have one market dominator and a few stragglers hanging around. Jump forward to today and you see a very different market for laptops. Windows is (still) dominating, but Mac OS X and Linux distributions, like Ubuntu, are growing like never before. The biggest difference you see in today’s market is that there is choice. You can walk around a store or browse the internet and find quality operating systems ranging from $500 to absolutely free.
But this is just the laptop market. Next to these well developed operating systems and machines a new bud is growing out of the idea that you don’t need a 17”, quad core processor to do everyday computing tasks like checking emails and browsing the web. That bud is the netbook, and with their smaller screens and slower processors a new need has arisen. That need is for an operating system to match the machine.
A few days ago Google announced their entrant into the netbook OS (operating system) market named ChromeOS. It promises to be a light weight, open source operating system designed with one thing in mind: cloud computing. Google says the OS will have no preinstalled applications and that computing can all be done on the web using services like the Google Apps suite and more. Originally, the idea for netbooks was that most of the work to be done on them would be done using cloud computing. It looks like Google is trying to return to this original idea.
But here’s the problem for Google: nobody will use ChromeOS.
By nobody I mean that the ChromeOS will fail to gain any sort of substantial market share. Why? Because Google has chosen to enter the budding netbook market when flowers are already starting to appear.
Look at Windows for example. Microsoft already acknowledges that the netbook market is going to be big with what they’re doing with Windows 7 (coming out in October). They looked at the netbook market, saw that the current Windows Vista doesn’t work on netbooks and that people were happy buying them with Windows XP installed, and decided that they needed to focus on getting Windows 7 to work perfectly to fill the gap they created with Vista. Their netbook solution: Windows 7 Starter Edition. While I can say first hand that Windows 7 Ultimate Edition runs brilliantly on a netbook, there is one very good reason why Starter Edition is Microsoft’s solution. Microsoft has said that they plan to essentially give Starter Edition away for free to manufactures just to make sure your next netbook will be running Windows. With the behemoth from Redmond giving away the most popular OS in the world, why would manufacturers even think about using a newcomer like Google’s ChromeOS on the same scale as Windows?
On that same point, look at what the Linix base has been creating for netbooks. Ubuntu Linux Remix has been out for a while now, ask any average user and they won’t even know what Linux is, let along Ubuntu. Even the likes of Dell, HP, Acer and Asus have offered Linux alternatives for their netbooks, but every attempt has been outsold by Windows XP. This shows that people like the familiar, even if that means the familiar is slower and older than the new alternative. For Google, ChromeOS presents an entirely new way of thinking about computing as well as being far different to peoples’ safe Windows haven. This will prove to be part of its downfall.
Restrictions in Linux OS’s and netbook OS’s have led me to use Windows 7 on my netbook. As an average consumer (well kind of) I don’t like the thought of my experience being restricted in any way. If you look at the ChromeOS, Google plans for you to do all of your computing over the internet. That means no storing your music, photos, documents, contacts, email or calendar on your netbook. Google wants that all online. It is this type of restriction that will be a major reason why ChromeOS will fail. What if you’re in the middle of nowhere? What if you’re on the subway? What if you’re on a plane? You won’t have internet access to get to your files. That is restriction number one. Restriction number two is online services. Google Docs, Flickr, Photoshop.com and iMeem are all great internet services, but none of them are at all comparable with their desktop counterparts. For example, Google Docs has nowhere near the functionality of Microsoft Office. That means the scope of your computing is restricted by the limitations of what the internet can offer you. With ChromeOS relying on you doing all of your computing online, you would be downgrading to a more limited experience by using it.
Similarly, Google themselves claim that all of the web apps usable on ChromeOS are available on all other operating systems. After all, ChromeOS is essentially just a web browser. Google’s struggle to market ChromeOS will come when people ask why they should choose it over Windows, which has much, much more to offer than just a web browser. People will have this choice: buying an OS that is a web browser, or buying an OS that has a web browser.
The final reason ChromeOS will fail is this: Google has chosen to enter ChromeOS into a market where comsumers are already confused. Judging from the reaction of my peers to my HP Mini, it’s clear that the average consumer doesn’t understand the purpose of a netbook. People don’t ‘get’ what a netbook is, even when it’s running Windows. Such a far out concept like ChromeOS and its way of interpreting netbooks as just a web browser will only further confuse people.
Google’s mantra has been about simplicity and ease of use. But in the case of ChromeOS, I believe they’ve made things too simple. Google has failed to see that netbooks can run full operating systems to a high standard. They’ve failed to recognize people’s needs and normal computing habits. Most importantly, Google has failed to recognize that are attempting to bring what looks like an inferior product into a market with much better alternatives.
Google has come into the netbook game with too little, too late.
You know how Microsoft say that one of the best thing about PCs is choice? Well hows this choice. I used their new tool to help you find the right laptop. Because obviously you can’t do it by yourself, there’s too much choice, no body could handle looking through 69 different laptops and finding the right one. If only there were four laptops that suit everyones’ need. Oh wait, the MacBook line. Let’s just ignore that for now.
I wanted to see how many laptops are comparable with the MacBook Pro 17”. As you can see, only one does. And it costs $5000.
Well Microsoft? What’s this about Macs being too expensive huh? You want me to pay $2000 MORE for a PC that’s slower and has less hard drive space than the MacBook Pro!? You’re joking right?
So much for Microsoft’s claims. Their own website blows their entire advertising campaign out of the water, that Macs are more expensive and less value for money than a PC. Nice work.
ARGH! I know, it’s a Zune!
Don’t worry, I didn’t go out and buy one. I’m in Australia, I can’t. But I did download and try the software on Windows 7!
So here’s my short review: iTunes is better.
Why you ask? It’s completely the user interface’s fault. You know the iTunes interface as a simple, sleek and highly usable. It’s not cluttered, it’s very unified and everything is going to be where you expect no matter what part of the software you navigate to.
I think of the Zune Software like this: it’s fine. Yes it’s totally usable and I could live with it. It has all the features of iTunes (minus the apps and ringtones). It even has some features better than iTunes. The Now Playing window in the Zune Software is pretty cool. Using the Zune.net social network, it grabs data and photos (similar to the Last.fm artist profiles) of the artist you are listening to and turns them into a fantastic screensaver like display. It’s far superior to the iTunes visualizers.
The problem I have is that the Zune software window is like a canvas. Any time you click into a new section, the user interface is wiped away and replaced with something completely different. You click from the Artists tab to the Album tab, and everything moves around. This is incredibly frustrating! While the iTunes sidebar is always there, the Browser is always there whether you’re looking at podcasts, music or movies, Zune doesn’t follow a unified browsing UI! To be fare, it’s something that I could get used to. It’s just something I don’t want to.
The user interface is gorgeous, I’ll put that out there now. Great graphics, great animations. Herein lies the problem. The animations are infuriatingly bad. Not the animations themselves but the rendering. When ever you change tabs, the UI you were looking at glides gracefully out and the new UI glides gracefully in. But the text! Oh god the text! It’s terribly rendered! The animation is fairly short, but not instant. So when the text is blurry and unreadable for about two seconds while it re-renders properly, I feel like bashing my head against the keyboard. How, after three versions of the software can’t the font render properly?
iTunes doesn’t employ fancy animations or transitions, but it is fast and properly rendered! For me, I would gladly ditch the animations and UI of the Zune Software (which doesn’t even follow Microsoft’s design principle) for the ease of use, simplicity and unity of iTunes.
Plus, I have an iPhone. I have no choice.
Dual Booting Windows 7!
11:18 May 23rd, 2009 | Notes
I’ve been meaning to dual boot the Windows 7 RC for a while now, but never got around to it for one reason or another. So this morning I decided I finally would.
Let me tell you, it takes a whole freaking day.
I went into this foolishly thinking that it would take a hour, two hours at max. Boy was I wrong. I began by clearing out my Mac of all the crap I’ve acumulated over the years to get me 50GB of space. I planned to devote just 20GB to 7, because I won’t need that much space. With the space cleared out, I ran Boot Camp Assistant a clicked partition.
“Partitioning Failed”
Crap. I eventaully learned that my drive was too fragmented to create 20GB of continuous space. Here’s where I jumped to conclusions: the Mac doesn’t have defragmentation software built in, therefore the Mac doesn’t get fragmented/it defragments on the fly.
WRONG!
What!? My drive is more fragmented than the chinese government!? NO! How do I fix it?!
Searching around the internet I found a few programs that claimed to defragment my hard drive… for $20. Since I don’t have a card that works on the internet, that idea went out the toilet. So I did the only logical thing, reinstall OS X. It took hours to get my Mac back to it’s original state. Wiping the drive, installing Leopard, partioning the hard drive, migrating my Time Machine backup, installing over a gigabyte of patches. THEN, I installed Windows 7.
The amount of driver problems I had was fairly minimal. The only big problem I had was getting the right driver for my graphics card. Windows Update got it right, then the Boot Camp Assistant installed another driver over the top of it and broke it! System Restore, Unintall Driver, Install Updated Driver.
OK done!
Finally, after about 10 hours I have Windows 7 installed on my Mac. Despite all the pain of going through all of this crap, some more good stuff came out of it. I have a partition I can install anything to, I have Windows 7 installed (duh) and it has speeded up my OS X install by quite a bit!
In the end, all I really have to show for it is that I have a pre-release version of Windows on my Mac.
I feel unclean…
MICROSOFT T-SHIRT!!!!
Yay! I got an “I’m A PC” T-Shirt from Microsoft today! I’m not going to tell you where I got it from because it’s related to a project for which I’m under a verbal NDA. So, you’ll never know where it came from!
I’m so devious!
In The Future, Hallucinating Icons Will be an Everyday Occurence
12:08 May 23rd, 2009 | NotesHa! I saw these videos a while ago. I have to admit, Microsoft’s glimpse of the future looks pretty awesome. Did anyone else notice a distinct lack of Microsoft branding anywhere?
This video parodies the original videos that didn’t have any voice overs on them. If you remember, the same guys parodied the Microsoft Surface video as well. They’re hilarious!
Finally!
3:08 May 13th, 2009 | 0 notes
TA DAAA! Apple has responded to Microsoft’s Laptop Hunters ads.
Once again, they’ve struck on the two areas that make Macs better than PCs for average consumers: customer care and ease of use. There are three ads: Customer Care, Elimination and PC Choice Chat.
My favorite one is Elimination, because it directly shoots at Microsoft’s claim that getting a Mac means no choice. In the ad, Megan spells out what she wants in a computer to a long line of PCs. As she lists her specifications, the PCs start leaving until there are only a few left. This method by Apple cleverly points out that as you want something more and more specific, the range of PC you can chose from gets smaller and smaller, counteracting Microsoft’s claim against Apple.
Then Megan asks for a computer that doesn’t have tons of viruses, crashes and headaches. You know what happens next.
Each one on that ads answer Microsoft’s claims while remaining witty and humorous. What’s not to love?
