Djdarlek’s Weblog

I’m in shock. I can’t believe i’ve seen this. For the last few months Microsoft has been working on a high profile 3 stage campaign to reinstall some good will for Vista. You may have seen the Seinfeld adverts where he talks about shoes and the like – they were bad enough. But I remember reading about this awful ‘experiment’ Microsoft were running a couple of months ago now. It was called the Windows Mo Have Experiment. Basically it was a publicity website featuring about a 100 video clips of Americans praising a product that had been pitched as the next version of Windows. They were also asked about Vista. Most of the comments were incredibly predictable, where the rep would be like ‘look at this you can burn a CD’ and they guys say “WOW That’s amazing! So Windows Mo Have can do this for me? This is really advanced technology surely?” And then they were told that it was actually Windows Vista. Sigh – come the fuck on Microsoft!

Today on the sides of lots of websites you will notice their stage 2 of the campaign – ‘i’m a PC’. It is the lamest thing I have ever seen and I cannot even be bothered to write about it. Its a sad sad day over at Microsoft.

Anyway, today on Engadget’s homepage I noticed an article about the Windows Mo Have Experiment. They ran it as a real Engadget article – as a ‘contribution’ from Ross Rubin, a columnist about technology, media and digital entertainment. The top half features a big picture that looks like a screen grab from the flashy website. Below it there was a transcript of some of the conversations found in the videos. I’ve added some notes about the examples they’ve used.

Subject 1: “My niece was looking up something for her nutritional science class and went to this Web site called apple.com. There were a lot of videos there that said Vista was bad.”

Somebody been kicking your ass with marketing for nearly a decade Microsoft?

Subject 2: “I’ve heard that Windows Vista gives you scabies.”

Yes, because we all catch diseases through software. I think disease education is in order for USA.

Subject 3: “Four of my friends on the American Online forwarded me an email that said Bill Gates would give me $10 million if I would tell my friends to buy Windows Vista and he didn’t. It must stink.”

On the American Online? Is this a clever way of saying AOL without having to acknowledge another service? And yes, Bill Gates can afford to give $10 million dollars to each of his customers. Over 80 million customers later he would be out of pocket $80000000000000000000000.

Interviewer 1: “…and so you see, with ReadyDrive you can significantly increase the performance of your PC without having to invest in expensive flash memory-based drives.”

Yes baffle these poor farmers with talks of ReadyDrives.

Subject 1: “Wow, that sounds great. So I’ll just order a hybrid hard drive with my next PC, right?”

Hybrid drives don’t even exist or have a name yet but this guy knows what they are?

Interviewer 1: “Well, it’s not quite that easy. You see, very few hard drive manufacturers have created hybrid hard drives and the performance gains really haven’t been that dramatic. Suppliers have shied away because of added cost. On the other hand, the price of solid state drives is falling fast.”

Are they referencing the solid state memory in Apple’s MacBook Air? Why Microsoft? Tell us something interesting about your products!

Subject 1: And these solid state drives that you mention have no moving parts and can work just fine with Windows XP, right?

Interviewer 1: “Well, yeah.”

Yep, it’s just you can hardly buy any hardware to do it.

Interviewer 2: “So you know how, sometimes, you just want to get at a little bit of information such as your day’s schedule or what the weather will be like and you’d rather not wait for your PC to wake up from standby?”

Yes Microsoft, I have this need! That’s why i’ve chosen macs and just put them to sleep instead of shutdown. I restart my computer like a server about once a month and at software updates. failing that I use my iPhone which is synced to my Mac.

Subject 2: “Oh yeah, I know what you mean. So Windows Vista can boot instantly?”

Interviewer 2: “Oh no, no. Instead we’ve come up with a way to put that information on a secondary display called SideShow so you can access it without having to boot the PC. You know, like on a cell phone.”

“Oh no, no?” You can actually hibernate? Why not push that relatively unknown feature to the masses.. it’s been working since XP! What’s this SideShow thing? So it’s like a secondary small screen that has a bit of information on it that makes the shell of my laptop look cheap? On my cell phone I can do hundreds of things, so this little screen has touch screen and the like?

Subject 2: ” A whole other screen just to look up little bits of information?”

Interviewer 2: “If I were to ask you to write down the number of PCs you’ve seen with that feature on this piece of paper, what would you wri– ah, I see you’ve written a zero.”

Nope, I’ve seen this on Tottenham Court Road about a year ago and I slated it dramatically in the window. Plus, the reason this feature isn’t everywhere is because, quite frankly, it sucks.

Interviewer 3: “…and with Windows Media Center, you can use your PC as a digital video recorder and record hours of video entertainment. You won’t find that in Mac OS X.”

Technically true. They’ve had many different bits of software that allow you to do this, but you have to buy the dongle that gives your laptop the TV signals. But they are all awesome and have been out for over 4 years. There have been talks that Apple have been designing something like this for Apple TV, which IMO would make it a killer app.

Subject 3: “Very cool. So I can use that with all my channels on my high-definition cable service, order Pay Per View movies and everything, right?

This all sounds so scripted.

Interviewer 3: “Yeah… just about. For that, you’ll need a PC with a Tru2Way receiver. Vista supports them and they’re totally coming soon.”

I’m fairly sure you can do this on Macs totally now and totally ages ago.

Subject 3: “Hmm, bummer. Hey, by the way, is Mr. Gates going to give me my $10 million now?”
Lame joke

Interviewer 3: “Right this way, Mr. Seinfeld.”

Lamer joke