We're Not Who You Think We Are
“Ducking the Shoe” is a phrase coined by Daniel Fienberg a couple of days ago on Twitter to mean “escaping even the most minor of punishments for extended errors or misdeeds.”
Well, yeah.
So in the spirit of George W. Bush’s ninja-like ability to duck a shoe thrown at him from point blank range, the following people and things spent 2008 getting away with shit that they really should have been busted on.
[Read more…] about Medialoper’s 2008 Ducking The Shoe Awards
Circles, my head’s going round in circles
— Pete Townshend
Circles, circles, everywhere I see circles. Right now, on three main things I use to access the world — Microsoft Vista, Firefox, and the iPhone — I’m always seeing circles, making me wait. Or, more to the point, letting me know that I am going to be waiting while an application or my email or a web page loads.
And they’re all slightly different: Apple has their rotating series of lines; Mircrosoft Vista has a rotating blue circle, while Firefox has a series of dots that chase each other. Extra fun: when you load a Firefox page on a Vista machine, you get both of their circles simultaneously!!
My question is simple: when did this happen? When did a rotating circle become UI shorthand for “your request is very important to us, please wait?”
And furthermore, who thought that it was a good idea? Because I’m not so sure that it is.
[Read more…] about Please Wait For Infinity While Your Page Loads
Hey kids, remember the late 1990s? Bill Clinton was President. The economy was humming along. Gas prices were low. Seinfeld was the number one TV show. And Microsoft ruled the tech world. You might not have liked it, but it was true.
At the time, it seemed like there was nothing that Microsoft couldn’t do: they had so much power that they were able to start the Browser Wars and win them without getting bogged down in a quagmire. Hell, even Windows 98 was a decent operating system.
For Microsoft, good times. And they’d like to remind you of those times, with an upcoming ad campaign starring another 1990s icon: Jerry Seinfeld.
An ad campaign where the co-star is another 1990s icon: Bill Gates. What? Bill Clinton wasn’t also available? While I understand that things aren’t going quite as swimmingly for Microsoft in 2008 as they were in 1998, I don’t think this will help.
[Read more…] about Microsoft & Seinfeld: A Match Made in the 1990s
Make that love.
We had some friends over for dinner recently and the discussion, as is common, turned to movies. Everyone’s opinion on what makes a good movie may differ, but there is one fundamental thing a movie needs: movement. For example, my friend Dave said that while he liked “Cloverfield,” he had a problem with the monster itself. It didn’t seem to have a purpose and its movements were random. Now Godzilla, on the other hand, was always on the go. He moved and did it with purpose. He was on his way somewhere. I had to agree. I too liked “Cloverfield,” but the monster’s intent was like its shape, amorphous and random. So what could have been a new, genre-defining monster movie was merely an engaging and likable affair that featured a bit of credibility stretching by using a hand-held camera POV for its duration. There is a world of difference between “like” and “love.”
This year, two movies in particular were competing for Best Picture at the Oscars. One was Paul Thomas Anderson’s “There Will Be Blood,” loosely based on “Oil!” by Upton Sinclair, and the other was (eventual winner) Joel and Ethan Coen’s “No Country for Old Men,” based on the Cormac McCarthy novel of the same name. Both movies feature sadistic central characters and have a theme of “the times they are a changin'”; the first due to unabated oil development around the turn of the last century and the other to a rising tide of drug running and criminality along the Texas border in 1980. But there’s a key difference to what separates the first movie from merely being an attractive, if long-winded exercise in greed and megalomania, to a thought provoking, riveting, and accomplished feat of storytelling in the latter: movement.
[Read more…] about Movies with Movement is What I Like
A lot of hay was made yesterday about a wide-reaching survey released yesterday by the Pew Internet and American Life Project. For example, one of the things that got serious play was that about half of the people out there still don’t live their lives around high-tech products.
Instead, I guess, they are living their lives around such mundane things as their jobs, their churches, their families and so forth. Then the survey broke down the actual users into sub-groups, and explained various things about the sub-groups. It was all very interesting and informative, and then I got to the very end . . .
In light of Microsoft Vista’s tardy, ho-hum arrival–and its incomprehensible, off-strategy “Wow!” marketing campaign–let’s revisit, and hopefully debunk, a commonly held myth about Microsoft, namely, that the company has “bad” technology, but compensates with it’s “good/great” marketing.
Even a cursory trip through Microsoft’s marketing past can serve as convincing testimony that Microsoft’s marketing is often ineffective, and often as strange as the company’s top executives can be at times.
[Read more…] about Of Microsoft and Marketing, Or Why the Vista “Wow!” Campaign is Actually a “Doh!”
Like all good media dinosaurs EMI Records is in no hurry to meet the future. The status quo is just too familiar and comfortable; better hang onto it as long as you can. Last week EMI postponed the future just a little bit longer by refusing a $4.1 billion takeover bid by WMG and breaking off discussions with online music services over the possibility of selling DRM-free downloads.
You would think a company that’s rapidly losing market share and issuing profit warnings every month would be taking drastic steps to turn things around, but that’s clearly not the case with EMI. As a card carrying member of the “big four” EMI is one of the last of a dying breed. I’m pretty sure there’s something in The Endangered Species Act that prevents the company from actually going bankrupt.
[Read more…] about Could Microsoft or Apple Be the Future of EMI?
For my inaugural ‘Loper report, which I’ve delayed almost as long as Vista, I thought I should tee off on something that really gets my goat. And that is: how companies come up with their positively idiotic names for products. You know what I’m talking about. Those names that sound like they were picked from an eye chart at random.
Last spring the tech blogosphere was buzzing about the impending release of a new Microsoft product code-named Origami. Like most products with code-names, details on the Origami were sketchy at first. Some speculated that it would be an iPod killer, while others thought it would be a more general purpose mobile entertainment device. The buzz was fueled by the appearance of mysterious video prior to the actual product announcement. The whole thing had a certain orchestrated quality about it.
Origami Day came and went and all we got out of it was a new acronym. Turns out the Origami is a UMPC (that’s short for Ultra Mobile PC). Essentially the Origami is a Microsoft reference specification that third party OEM’s can use to produce portable PC devices. UMPC’s are smaller than a notebook computer, but larger than a Pocket PC. And according to the Microsoft site, UMPC’s can do EVERYTHING.
When Microsoft announced the Zune last July, we had pretty low expectations for the digital media player. So much about the Zune just didn’t seem right: