Jerry Seinfeld Will Plug Vista 776
Barence writes "Microsoft has signed up comedian Jerry Seinfeld to its $300 million Vista PR blitz, as it attempts to turn around the negative perception surrounding its operating system. Reports suggest Bill Gates will also appear in the ads, which, given the comedy timing he displayed in his 'Bill's Last Day' video, and the deadpan manner of Seinfeld, could result in a huge hit for the company." Reader Zarmanto notes in his journal that "Mac users might be quite amused, considering that (like many other TV shows) the set of Seinfeld always had a Macintosh prominently displayed in the background."
Out of touch much? (Score:5, Interesting)
So, this could either be a great move on MS's part or an illustration of how woefully out of touch with popular culture they are. Seinfeld hasn't been on the air in over 10 years at this point (new episodes at least).
Re:Out of touch much? (Score:5, Interesting)
You have to assume that Crispin Porter (their new agency) is well aware of that, and plans to use it to their advantage. They have a reputation in the ad business of being the hippest of the the hip ad shops.
Wow. (Score:2, Interesting)
Given his sensibilities about not doing any more Seinfeld episodes, I would have guessed that he of all people would have better sense than to associate himself with such a crappy product and company, especially as a comeback.
I guess the money finally ran out from the endless re-runs and DVD box sets eh Jerry?
Wow, marketing! This changes everything! (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:I have a novel idea... (Score:3, Interesting)
And what would fixing "the damn thing" involve? I'm a late adopter to Vista (post-SP1) and ... well... it works fine. No incompatibility issues (literally, not a damn single one), no BSODs (ditto)... blah!
Re:Who are these people...? (Score:4, Interesting)
The little pop-up that annoys people to the point where they begin to just ignore it, or figure out how to turn it off?
The same could be said of any security feature. Good security's hard, and I've found the vista pop up to be no more annoying than the ubuntu one. I haven't used a Mac in years, but from what little I remember, it seems like it still has the pop ups. So, your two actual points seem to be that it pops up more than necessary and that it can be turned off. The first is a problem with other companies requiring administrator rights when they don't really need them, and the ability to turn it off is just giving people more options. So where's the problem?
Re:It won't work. (Score:2, Interesting)
I think you over estimate their target audience.
1. The target audience really doesn't care. Many people who get asked about things like computers to buy are promoting everything BUT Vista. But there's a great horde of potential consumers some of whom have HUGE budgets to blow who don't ask anyone.
2. The ONLY reason to advertise is to repeat something point of view until it becomes ingrained into the collective unconcious. (sp!!) Vista is good because Microsoft is shouting it from the rooftops.
It's also important to note the hollywood industry labels things "Sienfeldian" because he's brought in so much money making people laugh about nothing in particular. Which, is really hard to do.
So, it's a good idea. It needs to be executed well. Which is harder than coming up with a good idea!
VISTA = CHEVROLET (Score:5, Interesting)
I dont think Vista's all that bad, but reputation is powerful.
Re:It won't work. (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Wouldn't fixing some drivers give better PR? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:I have a novel idea... (Score:1, Interesting)
(Not the OP, posted AC to avoid the shame of using Vista.)
On my machine, UAC prompts taking freaking ages. When one shows up, first the screen goes black for 5-10 seconds. That may not sound like a lot, but it is when you're trying to use the freaking computer.
Then the prompt appears. I Accept it, and then the screen goes black for another 10-30!! seconds. Then finally the computer trudges along again.
Media keys have a noticeable 2-second lag. Again, it may not sound like a lot, but it is. Press Down on the volume to compensate for an over-compressed YouTube video, and you'll have to wait 2 seconds for that to happen. Pressing the Play and Stop buttons also has a 2-second lag before they respond. This did not happen under XP!
Now I know, I should just shut the damned UAC system off, because it's worse than useless. But I just can't bring myself to do that, since then I'll be left back in the good-ol' Windows days where everything is Administrator. Dammit, we're supposed to have moved past that.
The IE crap is annoying too. "IE can't open the page in the same window for some dumbass reason and will instead launch another copy." WTF?! You create tabs and then immediately break them by forcing pages in different windows. This is also Vista-only, and supposedly another UAC-ism.
The 1GB of memory used to sit at the desktop is annoying too. Why does Vista require 1GB (actually, a little over) to show an empty desktop? Damned if I know, but they should really do something about that. The great thing about that figure is that it's physical memory used. Virtual memory will actually be a bit (as in, 1.5GB-2GB) higher.
I could go on. Calling Vista a train wreck is too kind. The thing is a complete disaster, no matter what they pay Seinfeld to say.
The Episode (Score:5, Interesting)
Elaine (with Apple-ish grin): I just bought a Macbook
Jerry (non-chalantly sipping his coffee in front of his Dell): So? I've got Vista.
Elaine (frowning): But this is a Mac, Jerry.
Jerry: But it's not Vista.
Elaine: No, it's not Vista. It's a Mac.
Jerry: It's very shiny. What'd that thing cost you?
Elaine (defensive): What does that matter?
Jerry: One thousand?
Elaine: Jerry...
Jerry: Two thousand?
Elaine: Stop...
Jerry: Three th--
Elaine: $2755.
Jerry: Inclu--
Elaine: Including tax.
Jerry: 1250
Elaine: 1250 what?
Jerry: Vista.
Elaine: But it's not a Mac!
Jerry: It checks email.
Elaine: So does my Mac.
Jerry: Surfs the web.
Elaine: So does my Mac.
Jerry: Makes movies.
Elaine: So does...it does? I thought Windows didn't make movies.
Jerry (shrugs and sips): Vista.
(Door explodes open!)
Kramer: Jerry! The Dell store down the street is selling computers with Vista for $1500!
Jerry: 1250
Kramer (walking over to Jerry's laptop): Oooh, is that...
Jerry: Vista.
Kramer: Niiiice.
Re:Now wait a minute (Score:5, Interesting)
Seinfeld was doing HP commercials last year.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BraU_cpfBeI [youtube.com]
Guess he just decided to switch.
Re:The Episode (Score:5, Interesting)
Worryingly, this has the sheen of truth.
Re:Out of touch much? (Score:3, Interesting)
It's certainly been working for Apple, that's for sure. I can't even imagine what all of those "PC Users Are Losers" ads must cost. Now, if they'd just put a little of that cash into making the 3G aspect of their new phone actually work... or make the patch they just released to make it work actually make it work... nah, it's way more fun to make Windows users feel unfashionable.
Re:Who are these people...? (Score:1, Interesting)
Or is there some other amazing new security features in Windows Vista that I'm not aware of?
Yeah, there is, like memory randomization [slashdot.org]. That, and being so laggy on brand new hardware (fun experiment I discovered when I bought a box that came with vista: uninstall all of the crapware, reboot and start nothing, now right click on the desktop. I shit you not that the "Loading" mouse icon will appear for a while before the menu can be bothered to make it's appearance... ITS A FREAKING CONTEXT MENU, IT'S NOT THAT HARD. Run the same experiment on <any other OS> even on much older hardware and you'll find the context menus appropirately snappy) that I'm actually investing the time required to make ubuntu's wireless work, which, I'm told, leaves me much more secure in the end.
Re:I have a novel idea... (Score:5, Interesting)
Exactly: Ballmer's and Gates' egos.
Or, to put it another way, Baller would have to admit the he was dissembling when he made all those claims about Vista. Customers might not like this -- as Gerald Ratner found out [wikipedia.org], insulting your customers can have unpleasant results.
Re:Who are these people...? (Score:3, Interesting)
I use Vista regularly and UAC popups aren't very frequent. Copying files into protected directories such as WINDOWS are the most common cause for me (and a normal user would never do this).
Other than that, legacy applications (in my case, Delphi 6) sometimes need to be run as admin and therefore throw up a UAC prompt when run.
UAC is a sensible feature that in reality is quite far removed from the bullshit spread about it.
Re:Service Pack? uhhhh.... (Score:3, Interesting)
I'd love to see your sources for those 'statistics' of yours, because everyone I've heard is grossly misconstruing the truth.
The 15% Apple marketshare claim came out for new, retail sales only for a quarter, in the US. This stat didn't including online retail sales, so it pretty much knocked Dell and most HP machines out of their numbers, along with most all other major PC sellers. Again, complete 'Apple-washing' of statistics to make them sound better.
CNN money clearly states Apple's actual market share of sales, which is 4.7%, which mirrors Apple's real-world share.
http://apple20.blogs.fortune.cnn.com/2008/01/17/reports-apple-slipped-to-4th-place-in-q4-us-sales/ [cnn.com]
Of all of the honest to goodness metrics very closely mirror the ones of this site. My personal site, along with my company's website's OS stats also mirror these numbers.
http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_os.asp [w3schools.com]
Apple has increased marketshare, but only by about 1% of total to 4.8% over the past two years. Vista on the otherhand, has gained 11% total market share over the same period of time, all while XP's share hasn't budged over the past three years.
Re:Out of touch much? (Score:2, Interesting)
Its hip cause of the demographics. Target audience for windows vista grew up with seinfield and love him.
MS is just ignoring the children which they have already lost... TO US and TO MAC.
MS is going to be less relevant in the years to come: they have accepted their faith.
Re:Who are these people...? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:It won't work. (Score:1, Interesting)
It's funny, but I've never heard people openly talk about how much they hate a Microsoft product before. Personally I think Microsoft has made a LOT crappier products than Vista. Outlook, IE6, and Exchange are a lot worse than Vista.
It's always puzzled me why Microsoft is so evil -- because, in my experience at least, there was never any reason for them to be that way.
For example, back in the late 1980s, I had a Macintosh, and my favorite word processor was Microsoft Word 3 (for Macintosh, obviously). Its user interface had one or two flaws, but it was mostly good, and in terms of functionality and performance, it was the best of the bunch: it had an outliner, TOC and index generation, style sheets, an equation editor... and it performed well even with little memory; I used it to edit complex 100-page documents on an original Mac with 1 megabyte of RAM.
I've been very happy with several of Microsoft's other flagship products as well: Windows 98, Windows 2000, Windows XP; Office 97, Office 2000...
As far as I can tell, Microsoft became the giant they are because they had good products. I was there when everyone used WordPerfect, and I witnessed the ascendancy of Word; I saw people who had used MS-DOS for years switch to Windows... These changes all happened because the products in question were good. The "monopoly" that many people say Microsoft has, is, in my experience, simply the result of the superiority of their products compared to the competition.
Vista seems to be a big change because this is one of those rare moments that a major MS product just... sucks.
I, personally, am not interested in Vista, because XP works fine for me... and, perhaps even more importantly: I realize that I will have to pay for an upgrade every now and then, but Vista is overpriced, *and* it has an activation scheme that I will try as hard as I can to avoid. With XP, there is a limit to how many computers I can install it on. Fair enough. With Vista, I'll have to beg for a new activation if I so much as replace my video card.
...erm, WTF? I'm an OSS fan, but when it comes to actually *using* systems, I like Windows XP way more than any Linux distro... But I'll switch to Linux and deal with its problems, rather than tie a noose around my neck and hand the other end of the rope to Microsoft, the way that Vista requires me to do.
Hint to MS: your company is a success mostly because you make good products. Your anti-competitive shenanigans probably helped you, too... but they won't keep you afloat in the long run. Try focusing on making good products again, like you did so well with Word for Macintosh 3, Word for Windows 6, Windows 98, Windows 2000, Windows XP, etc... do that, and you won't have to bully people into buying your products; your products will sell themselves... again.
Re:The Episode (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Service Pack? uhhhh.... (Score:4, Interesting)
Booting? [infraredrose.com] That's what Vista is stopping that laptop from doing.
More to the point Vista is preventing you from taking a screen shot of a video, even one you've recorded from the evening news. A still image of a news broadcast in the context of a discussion regarding the broadcast or its subject is fair use, and Vista is preventing you from that fair use and so depriving you of your civil right of freedom of expression. That's not a minor thing. Maybe you don't care because you don't care to discuss current events or world history in the lens of public media - but some do and they're rightly offended.
Re:Service Pack? uhhhh.... (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Service Pack? uhhhh.... (Score:5, Interesting)
A big "if" (Score:3, Interesting)
I use Vista and I run in Vista as a normal user.
That puts you in the minority.
It takes a conscious effort to set up Vista that way.
I know, because I walked my son through the last part of the Vista setup when he got a new laptop.
The first user that is created is an admin. If you want to set up a non-admin, then you have to go back after the wizard is finished and set one up. Most people just start using the system after the wizard is finished and never set up a normal user (which, BTW is much less obvious how to do than it should be).
This renders the UAC pretty much useless, since it pops up and you just click on it and are never prompted for an admin password.
It's a typical half-assed Microsoft move. They had the opportunity to redesign the wizard to walk users through creating a normal account in addition to the admin account, but they didn't do it.
So most users (I would venture >95%) are one click away from malware.
Re:Service Pack? uhhhh.... (Score:2, Interesting)
Let's review my statement, shall we?
Um, your screenshot was not from the evening news. Although many applications will add DRM to user generated content there remain applications that can convert most content that is protected into unprotected content you can take a screenshot of when it's in Windows Media Center. I know six people with unprotected backups of that very film. The reason why I said to get a CNN shot is because it's more difficult to fake in real time. Not impossible - more difficult. That' doesn't prove your point or mine - it just is. If you don't have a tuner I accept this was your best available reply. The fact is that all commercially available DRM can be circumvented, and both you and I are capable of doing it. Joe Sixpack is the guy that's limited here and that's why I made the point about the evening news - Joe sixpack is the guy that's likely to reference a screencap of the evening news in an email, which is fair use.
So, in short, I didn't move the goalposts and your accusation that I did is unfair. Your problem here is that the text of our disagreement is clearly visible above our posts. I think I've pointed out this fact to you before. It's one of the reasons I really like slashdot. They don't edit.
Y'know, I can do this myself (and I have) but what the heck. Send the address to SlashdotEmail@GMail.Com (forgive the coding, but you get it...) and you'll have your tuner by the fastest available delivery. Do you have a preferred model that works with your cable company? Include a link to your preferred tuner in email, and a code string in your email that matches something in a reply so every slashdot troll doesn't try to scam me out of a tuner card. The first email with an address and the code string from your reply gets the tuner so send the email first. If I don't see an email I'll post that here and you'll have to trust me to be honest on this - or post a reply with a code string and let the trolls take me for a tuner card and then I'll post in all your threads a link here when I don't get a screen cap or at least a good 'shop. Freight being what it is, we'll have to continue this elsewhere so I'll open a journal article at a reasonable time and post a reply here that references it. Try to include the tuner controls in your 'shop, ok? That ups the credibility factor. And try to post it the same day you take it.
Oh, and if there's no Vista compatible HD tuner for your cable company I'm taking the win because Vista isn't even compatible with your cable.
How can this help? (Score:3, Interesting)
I read this earlier today. One of the justifications for hiring him was to compete with Apple by trying to reduce their image as a "stuffy" company.
I wonder how they think they can achieve that by hiring a middle-aged comedian who hasn't appeared in popular culture for 10 years, and even when he was popular, based his entire routine on whining about pointless social details.
Re:Service Pack? uhhhh.... (Score:3, Interesting)
More to the point Vista is preventing you from taking a screen shot of a video, even one you've recorded from the evening news. A still image of a news broadcast in the context of a discussion regarding the broadcast or its subject is fair use, and Vista is preventing you from that fair use and so depriving you of your civil right of freedom of expression. That's not a minor thing. Maybe you don't care because you don't care to discuss current events or world history in the lens of public media - but some do and they're rightly offended.
Uhm, quite a few media players on XP use screen overlays, which will result in a blank box where the video should be - nothing new in Vista, nothing to do with DRM and nothing to do with violation of rights.
Difference in UI Model (Score:3, Interesting)
The key difference between UAC and "sudo" is the level of understanding necessary to formulate the action. You may think you are being lazy when you type in the "sudo mount /dev/ipod" for the thousandth time but in reality you are being effective and efficient. You researched the right command to mount and access your iPod. You more know what the command is doing to both the system and iPod to do what you need. After that, using it once or a million times isn't lazy.
UAC does improve security but through "nagging" instead of a systemic fix. You brute force the user away from questionable actions instead of just having the system never bothering to do it. Approach it like a novice user: where all they see on the screen are series of buttons and things to click on with labels they aren't familiar with. A few are good, most are harmless, a few are bad, one special one is catastrophic. When they click any of the buttons, UAC kicks in and says "Allow this happen?" If they user doesn't know what all of the labels on all of the buttons mean, what is the purpose of asking for confirmation? It doesn't add any safety except to warn the user one of the buttons could be dangerous. That is useful information in of itself but fails to reveal to the user which one is the dangerous one.
Or simply put, "sudo" is rarely used because the user is unsure of the command while UAC is invoked for too many commands where the user is unsure of the command being executed. If you clicked on an email that said "save the attachment 'script.pl', type 'sudo script.pl' to win!" most Linux/BSD/Unix users would be like "Huh?!?! No way I'm doing that!" On Windows, in a similar situation user is only going to see a couple prompts warning them something dubious may happen if you proceed where some will be scared off from clicking "Allow" but some can and still will click it. It isn't that the Linux user is "smarter" than the Windows user. It is the UI model is broken on Windows where Microsoft/Vista assumes the user knows what a good action and bad action are. If they knew that, then UAC wouldn't be necessary in the first place.
Re:Degradation from standby/hibernate? (Score:3, Interesting)
You misunderstood what I wrote.
Set aside whether Vista sleeps/hibernates reliably, as thats not what I'm speaking about.
What I'm saying is that in XP, the more you would sleep or hibernate, the more you would accelerate system degradation.
So running a desktop for 3 weeks would work great, but running a laptop where you hibernate or standby 5-10 times per day, it would last much less time before needing a reboot.
Not all apps deal with sleep/hibernate well. Tons of devices/drivers dont deal with them well. So doing lots of sleep/hibernate would mean the system would degrade faster.
With Vista, the system is overall much more stable, and seems more resistant to leaky apps and problematic drivers, so it lasts longer under that type of usage than XP did on similar hardware. ..
Back to your comment, Vista does sleep reliably, at least on machines with good drivers.
The measure of whether a system is able to come out of sleep/hibernate successfully (a totally separate thing from what I'm talking about above) is 100% a driver issue. Device manufacturers have to write drivers that deal properly with standby/hibernate and recovery from such.
Most dont.
This is why you'll have someone with a high quality machine (like what I'm using) where sleep and hibernate work well, but another person running different hardware (especially consumer level crap) but the same Vista will lock up trying to come out of sleep or hardware.
This is one area where Apple's own-the-hardware/own-the-software approach pays off, and why things like that work so well for Macs.
Re:It won't work. (Score:3, Interesting)
I agree, many people have a vague dislike for Vista. I think it has to do in part with allowing Apple to be the one to tell consumers about Vista.
I'm normally one who wants to see marketing types drown in pools of their own blood but I do have to give Apple props for their handling of Vista. Nobody outside the techie circles even knew what the UAC thing was but the first time they sit at the PC and encounter it, they'll immediately think back to this commercial. Vista was made to look ridiculous there and the user experience is reenforcing that belief.
Not only that, the cancel or allow thing has worked its way into pop culture now. I've seen non-geeks using it now. Someone will complain about something and a friend saying something like "I think this place must be run by idiots!" and the friend will reply "You have come to a sad realization, cancel or allow?" The other guy gets the joke and does the Resident Expert sigh and says "Allow."
There is no countering this kind of resistance, this negative mind-share. Someone here on slashdot said he realized how bad Microsoft fucked up when even his technophobe mother said Vista was bad.