Author: paul

messaging

Exactly.

And so what makes Microsoft’s new “I’m a PC” commercials so jaw-droppingly bad is that they’re not countering Apple’s message, but instead they’re reinforcing it. That the spots themselves jump between dozens of different people who “are” PCs, that the spots make a point of emphasizing that there are a billion Windows-running PCs worldwide, this only emphasizes that “PC” is not a brand name but a generic.

This is what advertising is about — making you the consumer want the New Improved thing, with Whiter Whites/Scrubbing Bubbles/Moxie. All this campaign does is try to convince you that generic is OK, that wanting the common denominator is acceptable. What next? Airbrushing out Vista from product lineup shots? Have you seen Bob lately?

ouch . . .

Seattlest: Seinfeld Canceled by Microsoft:

Valleywag is reporting that the $300 million Microsoft ad campaign featuring Jerry Seinfeld has been canceled as the company seeks other ways to remind consumers that its products, like the characters in the ads, were totally cool in the Nineties, but now, not so much.

Windows was cool? Musta missed that.

You know, the old-fashioned way of winning customer loyalty is by making stuff that doesn’t, you know, suck. $300MM could have bought some of that, I think.

ready to lead on day one?

This isn’t someone I want to have the nuclear launch codes.

Details have emerged about how Republican vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin’s email account was broken into, including a hacker’s claim he was able to impersonate her online to obtain her password.

The hacker guessed that Alaska’s governor had met her husband in high school, and knew Palin’s date of birth and home Zip code.

Using those details, the hacker tricked Yahoo’s service into assigning a new password, “popcorn” for Palin’s email account, according to a chronology of the crime published on the website where the hacking was first revealed.

[From How hackers broke into Palin’s email – News – Builder AU]

9 nations, meet 11 representative communities

So where do you live, in the map of Patchwork Nation?

Campaign 2008: Patchwork Nation: Comunity Types > Monied ‘Burbs | The Christian Science Monitor:

The Monied ‘Burbs consist of 304 counties holding more than 84 million people, making them the largest and the wealthiest locales in Patchwork Nation.

Wealthier and slightly younger than America as a whole, this group also stands out for its educational attainment. More than one-quarter of the adults in these communities have college degrees, compared with 17 percent in the average U.S. county. The Monied ‘Burbs were an uber “battleground” group in 2004. They split their votes almost evenly between President Bush (49.4 percent) and John Kerry (49.6 percent) and figure to be crucial in 2008 as well.

The Monied ‘Burbs and their politics are represented by Los Alamos, N.M., in Patchwork Nation.

If “educational attainment” is the hallmark of this group, why the $%^&* did half of them vote for Bush in 2004?

This makes more sense than the Red vs Blue state map, since these patchwork elements are more likely to map onto voting precincts.
Continue reading “9 nations, meet 11 representative communities”

this sums it up

Sadly, No! » Best Advice Ever:

Don’t EVER let idiot whackjob wingnuts try to claim they are brave and Liberals are cowards. Let me put it this way:

One group has a huge need to walk around with guns and keep arsenals in their homes to feel safe. The other group has no such need, and doesn’t seem to suffer in the least by not being armed to the teeth.

Remember: republicans are cowards. They prove it with every gun they brag about.

A corollary: all bullies are cowards. Why else pick on the younger/smaller/unarmed?

not sure they get it

Canonical, the leading backer of the Ubuntu version of Linux, is hiring a team to help make open-source software on the desktop more appealing and easier to use.
The company plans to sign up designers and specialists in user experience and interaction to lead Canonical’s work on usability and to contribute to other free and open-source desktop-environment projects, including Gnome and KDE, Mark Shuttleworth, Canonical chief executive and founder of the Ubuntu project, wrote in a blog post on Wednesday.

He wrote: “We are hiring a team who will work on X, OpenGL, GTK, Qt, Gnome and KDE, with a view to doing some of the heavy lifting required to turn those desktop-experience ideas into reality.”

Shuttleworth has said recently that usability is the top priority for open-source software. Free Linux desktops should have “a user experience that can compete with Apple in two years”, he said at the O’Reilly Open Source Convention last week.

[From Shuttleworth: Open-source desktops need a facelift | Tech News on ZDNet]

This isn’t solved by a team, though some developers will be needed: what makes this work is a design czar, someone who can tell people when to stop. Citing Apple makes sense if they are going to get deeper than the GUI (and since all the projects named are window managers/desktops, it doesn’t look like it). Will the next two years be different from the last 10 or so?