Apparently I was not the only one who was confused by Microsoft’s Gates and Seinfeld team-up — Microsoft has decided to pull the ads due to the fact that they were “poorly received“. According to Mich Matthews, a Microsoft senior vice president of marketing:
“We wanted to be sure that when we do come out with our (new) major message, ‘Life Without Walls,’ more people would be paying attention than they would otherwise,” contends Mathews. “My goodness, did we do that.”
You sure did, Mich. While Microsoft did at first focus on the improvements it had made to Windows Vista, it has now not only gotten Seinfeld and Gates talking nonsense — it’s also tried the old bait-and-switch approach to Vista marketing.
While I can’t argue that the latter approach is an innovative way to market their new operating system, why not just come up with a slogan like ‘Windows Vista: really, it’s not that bad.’ Maybe Microsoft should have stuck to their guns and just kept touting Vista’s improvements?
Let me start this post by saying: I’m not a Microsoft hater. I’ve been a Windows Vista user for a while now, and Microsoft has made some serious improvements to their operating system since Windows XP, especially where things like drivers and stability are concerned.
While I agree that Microsoft has often adopted some less than competitive business practices and promoted closed technology standards, I don’t see the company as pure evil — they’re simply a software company that has created software products.
But with all the criticism that has been mounted against Windows Vista, it seems odd to respond with a set of ads that, well, don’t really talk about Windows at all. I talked about the first Jerry Seinfeld/Bill Gates team-up, so here’s the latest installment:
So what does all this have to do with Microsoft and their Sir William of Gates’ (as Ricky Gervais called him) plan to dominate the global software market? Well, if you can figure that out from this ad, you should probably start picking lottery numbers.
I’ve been a Seinfeld fan for a long time, and while Jerry’s Seinfeld’s nihilistic and often-egocentric brand of humour works most of the time, I’d argue that this time it falls flat on its face. If you don’t believe me, you can watch the ad for yourself.
It stands to reason that every industry has a use for competitive intelligence. But when your product’s growing outside for all to see, it’s only a matter of time until someone decides to use satellite images to check out their crops.
This article focuses mostly on growers using the information provided via aerial and satellite images to get better acquainted with their own crops — they use near-infrared images to determine the grape vines’ vigor before the grapes are harvested.
The technology is called Oenoview, and it provides detailed information and imagery to wineries about their products — but wouldn’t a competitor be just as interested in what the neighbouring winery is producing? It seems a bit unfair on the surface, doesn’t it?
I posted before about another web hosting review site that I wished I had come across when I was looking for a web host (although that was back in 2006 — how time flies). If you’re currently looking for webhosting, I would seriously consider checking out Web Hosting Rating.
I’m always still amazed that there are hosts out there that are able to offer unlimited bandwidth and unlimited sites; I guess we’ve come a long way in terms of what it costs to maintain a site (and I’m only talking from when I was looking for hosting in 2006).
I guess now the real trick is to compare the hosting review sites to each other and see which one offers the most comprehensive and honest reviews.
I just thought I’d post this video I came across that I found completely hilarious (and although it’s Sunday night, I would imagine most of you will be reading this on Monday morning — and a laugh’s a good way to start the week).
This is comedian Don McMillan talking about what you shouldn’t do in PowerPoint — and definitely strikes a chord with anyone who has sat through a ton of presentations.
It’s estimated that every individual worker spends about an hour and a half a week browsing sites that have nothing to do with their jobs, which they reason costs employers about £1000 per employee per year.
Steve points out the obvious flaws in the CBI’s logic — that workers who are prevented from shopping on eBay or checking their Hotmail accounts are not necessarily going to become productive, and that the very definition of ‘work-related’ is problematic (is reading the newspaper work-related for example?).
While I agree completely with both of Steve’s points, I think there’s another angle to consider here as well. Companies can easily restrict workers access to sites, and those workers have little recourse. Very few people could legitimately claim they need access to sports scores or whatever else they might want to read in the course of a day.
What a day of tortured joy for Canadian Apple fanatics — Rogers Wireless finally launches the iPhone here and the Rogers website subsequently dies. I’m sure their call centres aren’t faring much better.
While I’ve never been much of a Mac/Apple fan myself, I was the proud owner of a 1 gigabyte iPod Shuffle at one time, until it met its demise in a washing machine accident.
Speaking of shuffles, Rogers has pulled off some fancy footwork when it comes to how they’re going to be charging people for data on their phones. But first a little background.
As regular readers of this blog probably already know, I’ve never exactlybeen happy with the Canadian telecommunications industry. They’ve been bilking Canadians out of money unfairly for years now, with little or no government intervention to keep them on the straight and narrow.
It appeared that no one in government was willing to take on the big Canadian telecom companies and stand up for Canadians right to not get screwed on telecommunications service provision. It would appear David McGuinty’s Get Connected Fairly Act may change all that.
According to the Canadian Press:
Liberal MP David McGuinty says Canada’s cellphone industry has collected billions of dollars in “misleading” charges over the last 25 years, and he’s proposing legislation to stop it.
The article is mostly about what motivates people to work (Ulrich uses the equation ‘talent = competence + commitment + contribution’ to suggest that talent is no good without the other three components).
I talked about something similar last summer when I described work as an increasingly fractured narrative (although I’ll admit that maybe my undergraduate degree in literature makes me just think of everything as a narrative).
Professor Ulrich uses the word contribution to describe a situation where “employees feel their personal needs are being met”, and where the employee feels the investment of their is meaningful.
