Disqus - Latest Comments for Pyrmont

Re: Humanize Microsoft? That’s impossible!

Pyrmont — Wed, 17 Sep 2008 23:05:09 -0000

http://valleywag.com/5051455/microsoft-to-annou...

Re: Humanize Microsoft? That’s impossible!

Pyrmont — Sat, 13 Sep 2008 01:19:16 -0000

Two things:

First, I think you miss the point of the Apple commercials. Unlike what the Microsoft ones are trying to do (or perhaps trying to do since no one knows for sure) the Apple commercials have a single objective: make people think Macs are easy to use. Whether you like Justin Long after the commercial or whether you'd rather have a beer with John Hodgman is beside the point. None of the ads leave you in any doubt that using Windows is a pain and that things would be so much easier if you just owned a Mac. These ads are particularly effective on people who do not own a Mac and assume that it really will be as good as they make it out to be.

Second, the trouble with the Microsoft ads is that they're not addressing Microsoft's actual problem. This problem is not that their company is perceived as inhuman, it's that their products are perceived as bad (or at the very least poorly designed). This campaign may well be successful in humanising Microsoft (certainly they're helping Bill Gates seem cool) but if Microsoft thinks people aren't flocking to Vista just to stick it to the man they're sorely in need of a reality check. Vista's problems are the hardware requirements, compatibility issues (or perceived issues), and it's 'helpfulness'.

To be fair to Redmond, I do think part of the reason people aren't flocking to Vista is that with XP they actually created a pretty good operating system that does what most people want it to do and which everyone's quite used to after 8 years or so. But the ads don't address this problem either.

Finally (OK, so maybe there were three things), I think it's quite legitimate for people who may not be the target audience to look at what a marketing campaign should be aiming at achieving and say whether it is falling short of that mark or not. It doesn't matter whether I get the ads or not, it's whether the ads address the problem or not and in the case of this campaign they don't.

Re: Blatchford pines for the monologue

Pyrmont — Fri, 22 Aug 2008 10:23:25 -0000

I think you mischaracterise her argument slightly, Matt. The first thread of which is not an attack on the democratisation of journalism (that comes later) but instead a theory of why the act of blogging is bad for journalists:

Most important, Michael Farber is right. We all have a limited number of things to say, informed opinions, funny lines, quirky observations. We have only so many words in us. Do we really want to spend them on something as ephemeral as a blog?

Her point is that blogs, in encouraging and rewarding a near-constant stream of new material, set up a situation where it is all but impossible to consistently ensure quality journalism. Consistently good journalism requires time. Time to do the research, time to talk to the people involved and, most importantly of all, time to write. Blogging, with its emphasis on post now, ask questions later, all but precludes this. Moreover, the increasing pressure newspapers put on their reporters to churn out content is turning them from journalists into bloggers and from producers of quality writing to producers of poorly written drivel.

While I think you do correctly identify the second strand of her argument (the democratisation of journalism is bad), with all due respect, I think your counter-argument is a little weak. First, if you're looking for someone let me be the person to say that journalism is not supposed to be a conversation. Just because a technology has come along and created a related field doesn't mean the related fields are equivalent. Journalists may now be bloggers but that doesn't mean that bloggers are journalists.

Second, that we now have the ability to have a two-way dialogue is great and I'm all for celebrating that but let's call a spade a spade. A two-way dialogue? That's a conversation. It's people putting forth different points of view and modifying their position (or not) based on what the other person says. Journalism is the act of investigating a story (often one that's topical), doing the research, and writing it up in a way that informs the reader. Does that make journalism and the Internet mutually exclusive? No, of course not. What it means is that you can't just call any form of writing about current events journalism.

Re: Delicious 2.0: Who bookmarks any more?

Pyrmont — Fri, 01 Aug 2008 11:10:53 -0000

I guess I don't qualify as 'hard core' user (I only have 272). I use del.icio.us to bookmark two types of things: interesting things that I might want to refer back to at some point (http://delicious.com/pyrmont/design) and long-form articles I come across but at that moment don't have time to read (http://delicious.com/pyrmont/unread).

The new del.icio.us redesign doesn't really impact upon either task so I'm happy insofar as they didn't break anything.

Re: Was Hasbro right to kill Scrabulous?

mathewi — Wed, 30 Jul 2008 11:13:53 -0000

I couldn't agree more, Michael.

Re: Was Hasbro right to kill Scrabulous?

Pyrmont — Wed, 30 Jul 2008 11:08:52 -0000

Right, I'd agree that there's a case to run of trademark infringement but that's quite different from what's being alleged here (at least in what I've read). I tend to get (perhaps overly?) concerned whenever anyone seeks to expand the ambit of intellectual property through legal intimidation. I believe in intellectual property but as something that strikes a balance between creators and users; not something that's just for the advantage of copyright holders.

Re: Was Hasbro right to kill Scrabulous?

Pyrmont — Wed, 30 Jul 2008 11:08:34 -0000

Re: Was Hasbro right to kill Scrabulous?

mathewi — Wed, 30 Jul 2008 10:58:53 -0000

That's an interesting question, Michael -- I'm not sure of the legal niceties when it comes to copyrighting or trademarking games. I suppose Hasbro could argue that the similarity in the name and the design of the board would tend to cause confusion in the minds of consumers, which is the basis of most trademark cases. Perhaps it will go to court and we'll find out :-)

Re: Was Hasbro right to kill Scrabulous?

Pyrmont — Wed, 30 Jul 2008 10:52:45 -0000

Maybe this is a silly question to be asking at this point but what exactly was infringed? The idea of a game cannot be protected under copyright. According to the US Copyright Office:

Some material prepared in connection with a game may be subject to copyright if it contains a sufficient amount of literary or pictorial expression. For example, the text matter describing the rules of the game, or the pictorial matter appearing on the gameboard or container, may be registrable.

Can the Scrabble board be said to contain a sufficient amount of literary or pictorial expression? I'm all for upholding intellectual property rights when they've been infringed but it's not clear to me what Scrabulous has done wrong.

Re: Why Microsoft will never win

Pyrmont — Sat, 07 Jun 2008 01:14:24 -0000

This is related more to the title of your post than the actual article itself so I hope you'll forgive the indulgence. It seems to me Microsoft has been beset by four major failures in the past ten years or so:

1. The failure to establish a dominant OS in the consumer electronics market.

2. The failure to capitalise on their OS position in the cellular market.

3. The failure to capitalise on their OS position in the Internet market.

4. The failure to develop a vision for their desktop OS.

Whether they can ever win again will be determined by whether they can turn any of these mistakes around.

Developing a successful consumer electronics OS is perhaps the easiest since no one has else has much of a foothold yet (Take 2 of the Apple TV doesn't seem to have set the world on fire any more than Take 1 did) so it's not as if Microsoft has to compete with a dominant player. Moreover, their experience with the Xbox should have taught them a great deal about this area. The move to allow Xboxes to easily playback codecs used for video on the Internet is a promising step but it does make one wonder why we even had to wait? Is Microsoft worried about how to make their products attractive to consumers or how to cosy up to the media industry?

Apple's iPhone demonstrates things that Windows Mobile should have been doing years ago. Microsoft's failure in this area is disconcerting because it seems to indicate that even with all the money that was available to work in this area nothing even close was produced. My concern would be that this implies a systematic breakdown in the design, engineering and the business sides of this division and one that won't be easy to fix.

Their failure in the Internet era seems to have been in part a lack of adequate planning. Banking solely on proprietary standards and overwhelming market share looks as if it were the beginning and end of how Microsoft planned to make money online. I'm not so sure the NetDocs failure is as big a deal as some of the others have suggested. Microsoft's problems with the Internet aren't that they lack popular products (MSN Messenger and Hotmail), it's that they haven't been able to turn any of them into major alternative revenue sources. NetDocs might have eventually made them a lot of money but it's 7 years later and despite the existence of plenty of other web-based word processors no one seems to have worked out how to turn much of a profit with them.

Finally, their failure with the desktop OS is in part the result of having developed too good a product. There are problems with Windows XP, to be sure, but for many people it represents the end-point of the WIMP OS. It simply works well enough that Microsoft has been unable to present a compelling reason to upgrade. Perhaps what Microsoft needed with Vista wasn't a further honing but a radical departure. Perhaps a new paradigm was needed (eg. multitouch). Perhaps they needed to realise they have two separate customer bases (consumers and corporate IT departments) and focuses on one or the other of those groups. I'm not sure but then I'm not being paid to come up with a vision for where Windows needs to go.

I don't think any of these problems are insurmountable, however, the concern must be if Microsoft has gone this long without being able to fix them are they simply incapable in their current incarnation of coming up with the necessary solutions?

Re: FriendFeed kill Twitter? Not going to happen

Pyrmont — Sat, 24 May 2008 14:12:36 -0000

Nooo! You fell for his link-bait!

Re: Taking notes online: Still looking

Pyrmont — Mon, 25 Feb 2008 08:43:04 -0000

The biggest problem for me with Google Notebook is integration: it needs to allow you to 'paste' files into it (both offline files and ones from other Google applications). If it could do that it'd have me completely on board (although you're right that organisation is another area someone needs to start paying attention to).