Mainstream Press "Cringes" At Win7 Launch Parties 830
lurking_giant writes "Well, Microsoft has done it again with the YouTube Windows 7 launch party video that is turning the stomachs of even the mainstream press with its clueless and campy marketing style. A Washington Post reader was quoted as saying 'If Microsoft had been put in charge of marketing sex, the human race would have ended long ago, because no one would be caught dead doing something that uncool.'" Even the Guardian's resident die-hard Apple hater calls it "the most nauseating advert in history."
Ratings disabled? (Score:5, Informative)
I wonder why...
NPR weighed in (Score:4, Informative)
Heard it on All Things Considered on the way home tonight. They played a clip from the "how to give a party" video. There were several comments about how MS's marketing dept had missed the target again.
Re:Look at the Bright Side (Score:5, Informative)
Pundits Hate Tux the Linux Penguin, Too (Score:3, Informative)
Hell, *I* hate Tux the Penguin. Nothing screams Dork in a College Dorm Room louder than Tux. (OK, maybe a Middle Earth poster...) But the goofy little guy endures, so he must be reaching somebody in the target audience who's not me and the pundits. Maybe this Win7 ad reaches the same key demographic.
Of course, the preceding argument presumes that Linux has some kind of unified and organized marketing program. Which is, y'know, ridiculous...
Re:Look at the Bright Side (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Pundits Hate Tux the Linux Penguin, Too (Score:3, Informative)
Re:lol (Score:3, Informative)
Dude... thanks for linking at last to a version that's actually funny rather than that lame 'if we bleep it out it sounds like she said fuck' version.
Re:First post... (Score:2, Informative)
Firstly, it is newer technology. It includes drivers for modern hardware (XP kinda sucks on my laptop, as I recall). Security is vastly improved (granted, people who won't want to switch are probably the same people who know how to make Windows secure) with things like UAC, which has been upgraded from the Vista version to behave more like sudo (it only asks once per 15 minutes or so). It looks a lot nicer and supports DirectX 10. Many parts 'under the hood' have been improved, such as improving performance by suspending background tasks when a fullscreen app (i.e. game) is running. And of course it has a much more modern interface that I find rather easy on the eyes (though still years behind Compiz Fusion *sigh*), which to me is somewhat important.
The only thing I don't like is that god-awful "ribbon" in Office (and other MS programs)--but fortunately OpenOffice.org runs just fine.
Re:The best way to use windows ... (Score:5, Informative)
Ie. what I want to do is simply mv */*xml . Very basic stuff.
Being an ignorant *nix geek, I find this a difficult task to achieve using the GUI, so I try the MS-DOS shell, I still can't work it out, move being somewhat different to mv. And I freely admit it might be my fabled geek ignorance of Windows at work, so if anyone can give me the DOS cmd that does this ...
for /d %i in (*) do move %i\*.xml .
Re:First post... (Score:4, Informative)
OS X is not set up or friendly to any kind of power user.
Go to any technical convention and count notebooks. I think you'll find that a majority of hardcore geeks disagree with you.
Odd you should bring this up as OS X decides that the entire world outside your user profile doesn't exist. Granted there are no warning when you try to access it via the GUI, in fact there is no accessing the file system using the GUI.
WTF are you on about? Open the Finder. Click the topmost icon in the left column - that's your local hard drive. Now explore as you see fit.
I'm typing this on Ubuntu - I usually pick Linux+KDE when given the choice of desktops - but have been around Macs enough to know that you've never actually touched one.
Re:As per usual, nobody is getting it. (Score:3, Informative)
[reposting since Slashdot damaged the previous post]
Because they have enough wealth and power to hire one of the smartest public relations firms on the planet. Waggener Edstrom is the same firm in charge of the Fox Channels. If there's any one thing they know how to do, it's identify a market and then lock down that market forever and ever and sell them whatever the hell 'truth' they feel like selling.
Just a little remark: there's no company called the "Fox Channels". The Fox brand is spread over dozens of semi-independent companies of News Corp., which have little relation to each other in terms of their management and PR. Saying "Fox Something" when you deal with huge corporations is simply useless. Waggener Edstrom has been doing some work for "Fox International Channels" in particular, which are doing work broadcasting and producing shows for public outside USA.
What is the company Microsoft previously worked with? Crispin Porter + Boguski, also considered one of the "smartest marketing firms on the planet", who have done work for Burger King, Coca Cola, American Express, Domino's and more. And now they have Microsoft on their portfolio thanks to their work few months back, which was poorly received, and mostly forgotten by now, with frequent strategy shifts, awkward moments and prematurely ending projects and relationships. This is how these "big smart marketing companies" build portfolio and you better get used to being tricked by their statements when "googling a little" as you say you do.
As for these party ads, I enjoy how you retroactively try to explain Microsoft's decisions, but their behavior is very typical. As any person/company with vast resources, they believe the fastest and safest way to success is simply to find and hire the "top" people for lots of money. Even if the people involved in this decision knew any better, they know that getting the "top companies" is simply a less risky decision, and risk is definitely a factor when your job is on the line.
To praphrase a sentence, "no one was fired for hiring [top company in some field]". It's also one reason why people with such vast resources frequently arrive at subpar results, because money doesn't translate into success as easily. Case in point:
Like many tech PR firms, WaggEd also monitors religiously Twitter trends involving its biggest client. On March 11, WaggEd went beyond simply monitoring tweets: It introduced a beta version of a software tool for monitoring and analyzing them. Do they sound stupid now?
I'm missing your point. Even I have written a tool for analyzing tweets, as I bet anyone who toyed with Twitter's API. Can I get lots of money now? All I get out of the above is that you're easily impressed by buzz-words. The amount of Second Life, Twitter and Facebook apps a marketing company has may have surprisingly little to do with how good they are at making advertising campaigns.
Not to mention Twitter doesn't accurately reflect the kind of crowd Microsoft makes the bulk of their money with, which is enterprise and OEM deployment. Twitter is predominantly teens with too much time on their hands. Is this your example of a PR company can "identify a market and then lock down that market forever".?
As for the psycho-babble reasons you defend the awkwardness of the ad, I have to admit, bravo. If you ever work in a marketing/PR company like Waggener Edstrom, this is exactly the kind of babble you need to sell services to clueless management. And with this insight, now you know why big companies have crappy ads: because the marketing companies they use don't need to be really good at selling products to end-users, they mostly need to be good at selling service to management.
As for you, coming here and being indignant about why Slashdot discusses Microsoft's ads is utterly pointless. This is an echo chamber full of people who are critical of Microsoft. Echo chambers have this property of seemingly
Re:First post... (Score:2, Informative)
They've chosen a slightly retro, awkward and geeky theme to these adverts, and trust me, the awkwardness is intentional (Remember Bill Gates and Seinfeld?).
Slightly? I suppose, in the same sense that nitroglycerin is slightly unstable.
This campaign reminds me of movies that are intended from the outset to be good camp, but just end up plumbing the depths of horribleness without any redeeming qualities at all.