Speculation about the Zune spiked after this Financial Times story, in which Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer says that we “should not anticipate” a Zune phone (no, really?) and that Redmond (as the FT paraphrases) “would stick to its strategy of developing software to support a range of mobile devices.”
The Financial Times story then goes on, noting that Ballmer “seemed all but ready to throw in the towel on the Zune mobile device” during his CES keynote, and speculating that “if there is a future for Zune, it lies in planting the software and online service linked to the player in other devices.”
But Zune spokesman Adam Sohn insists that “a lot of people … took [Ballmer's comments] and ran in the wrong direction,” adding that “a lot of people jumped to an ‘either/or,’ when in fact it’s a ‘both/and’ situation.”
It wasn’t hard to predict the mediocrity of Zune. It’s Microsoft hardware, for goodness’ sake, running Microsoft software saddled withRIAA rules.
Maybe nobody’s said Zune is dead yet, but I’m saying now it was doomed from birth.
Microsoft decided not to focus on odd antics of Seinfeld and Gates this time around and instead will feature a company engineer who resembles the PC guy (aka John Hodgman) in Apple’s ads. According to those familiar with the new ad the “PC” guy says, “Hello, I’m a PC and I’ve been made into a stereotype.”
Heads across the Internet have found themselves being scratched 80% less since this story broke earlier today.
I saw it yesterday (from a distance, no sound) on TV and thought man this is a long ad, what message could take that long?
I think it “plays” long because there’s too much going on. I worked at an ad agency for almost 4 years, and I know how these things work. If you don’t have one very powerful creative type running things, you get an ad created by too many people. Too many cooks spoil the soup. Everybody wants their “bit” in the spot, and in the absence of a strong leader, they get it. This affliction is rampant in US advertising.
I can close my eyes and see what happened here: one ad agency creative had to have his churros, another had to have the ID card, another had to have the shoe stiffness joke, another had to have his “you’re a 10″ joke. It adds up.
I think on a very intellectual level, to Seinfeld show lovers (10+ years ago now), it works. But to the other 85% of the country it’s a too-long, unfunny, muddled message head scratcher. And next to the simple, quick, biting Get a Mac Apple ads, it’s a clear loser.
But here’s the most important thing about it: when compared to the Apple ads, the ad mirrors exactly the much larger corporate themes. Apple and its products are focused and simple, and Microsoft is a disaster, both in products, message and corporate direction.
Well, maybe not the whole world, but a healthy portion of it that resides exactly within the dimensions that set apart my body from the rest of the universe’s matter.
No, I’m not yawning because I prefer Apple products over Microsoft products. I’m yawning because if someone stops doing something, and that something wasn’t doing anything, what does it matter if they go?
Microsoft has been sucking for almost a decade now. It’s lost its way. One look at its web sites can tell you that. A potpourri of designs, domain names, styles and colors. It shows a company with 0 direction, no Grand Plan. If the eyes are the window to the soul, web sites are a window to a business’ cohesion.
If a look at MS’s wild array of web sites don’t invoke in you a feeling of unbounded, glorious schizophrenia, read the long, sad story of Vista, née Longhorn.
If I was Gates, I would have stepped in and commanded my underlings to develop a unifying company theme, and would have followed that with a web site and PR image unification. Oh what, that’s expensive? C’mon, this is Microsoft we’re talking about. I would have gotten the most important 100 people in the company together and asked things like
“Can anyone answer this question in one sentence: what do we do?”
“Should we be making hardware?”
“Why can’t we crack the search world after 5 years of instense effort?”
Microsoft needs a big fat reinvention like Apple got in 1998, but Gates didn’t do it, and at the twilight of his watch the company’s only successes are 1. holding onto their business clients with MS’s (admittedly very good) business software, and 2. Xbox empire.
So when the world mourns Gates’ departure, I say “Why”?
This news.com story details a bold Steve Jobs poke at Flash, Adobe’s ubiquitous web content delivery technology.
Jobs used the Apple shareholders’ meeting to publicly dismiss the the full-blown PC Flash version as “too slow to be useful” on the iPhone. He then went on to describe the mobile version–Flash Lite–as “not capable of being used with the Web.”
That’s an unusual–albeit refreshingly frank–way to talk in public about a business partner. Give Jobs credit for speaking his mind, although I very much doubt Adobe appreciated his candor.
That jolted me into looking at where Flash stands today.
No iPhone Flash Support
Flash didn’t debut on the iPhone, and it looks like it’s not going to be part of what many say is the World’s Best Phone for some time, if ever.
YouTube is Moving Away from Flash
Months ago, in an effort to support the iPhone and AppleTV, YouTube began the massive task of re-encoding its millions of videos in the much-more “open” H.264 standard.
It’s Still Big, Bloaty, Proprietary, and Update Hungry
And resource-hungry: watch your processor activity move up fast when you use it. Adobe/Macromedia (Flash’s former master) had years to make it run fast, but instead they chose to add features, a conundrum that is the result of one of the Laws of Programming: you can have features or light weight, but not both. Flash is a 5MB download.
That’s not to say that right now we’re seeing Flash in decline. Its installed base is absurdly broad. But if it’s not on revolutionary devices like the iPhone, we’re probably seeing the early writing on the wall. And that wall is graced with the likes of RealPlayer, Quark Immedia and other names on it.
Apple Inc. shares rose $9.06 to $183.42. The company reported fiscal fourth-quarter net earnings $904 million, or $1.01 a share, on revenue of $6.22 billion. Lat year, Apple earned $542 million, or 62 cents a share, on $4.84 billion in sales. Analysts surveyed by Thomson Financial forecast earnings of 86 cents a share on revenue of $6.07 billion. Among the quarter’s highlights were sales of 2.16 million Macintosh PCs and 1.11 million iPhones.
I’m redoing a client’s Dell hunk of junk XPS tower right freaking now and I made the mistake of thinking the Dell Windows installer would autodetect the internal hard drive. Oops, of course not. The hard drive is SATA and so I have to create a floppy containing the SATA drivers just so the Windows Installer that shipped with the Dell can detect the hard drive which, well, shipped with the Dell. Nice. A freaking floppy!
I still find myself at this same agonizing task of very slowly committing suicide via Dell. I can boot into the current Windows installation from the internal SATA drive, but even with the floppy containing the SATA driver, the Windows installer can’t find the hard drive.
Comparatively speaking, all my Macs have been much easier to deal with than any of the Windows, or even Linux, systems that I have dealt with. Even though I enjoy using Linux and mucking about with config files, I’m never enjoying my job when I have to fool with Windows.
– and later —
Turns out the driver on the disc I received from the customer contained the wrong SATA driver altogether. Downloaded the newest SATA driver from Dell and it worked fine. Well until the printer driver reinstall failed, but then the printer was suddenly recognized, and IE 7 never showed up in Windows or Microsoft Update. Even though both said I had authenticated with WGA. I download the update manually and told the client to make sure it installed because I was 4 hours past do. I emailed her to check up on the system from hell. Oh did I mention downloading the HP driver via an optional Windows/Microsoft update crashed the system…hard..with a blue screen…some sort of fatal exception…buffer overflow. I had to roll back and get the heck out of there. I’ve got to come back to network all the machines after the FIOS install anyway so I can always rebuild the system software again then.
The XPS Gen 3, or whatever awful name Dell marketing came up with for the system, is an ugly hunk of junk with a case that didn’t fit quite right until I made a blood sacrifice. Literally. I have an inch or two gash on my thumb/hand area where I cut myself trying to get the case back together. When I picked the system up, the whole case was misaligned and wouldn’t close properly. I’m not sure what the Geek Squad did to this thing when they had it before me, but things were in dire shape.
[ed: I pulled this from here to show that, while pain can be found on all sides of computer maintenance, only Windows offers that perfect storm of frustration, anger, exasperation and thoughts of indirect violence -- Matt]
I think that’s more of a statement than a question these days. Vista is, at best, seeing lukewarm reception in the OS marketplace. And the Zune? Hmmm. Not much to say about that. Microsoft has seen a string of music services go down in flames to Apple’s iTunes Store and iPod juggernaut.
If Microsoft resolves all those concerns, no one (including the Open Document Format camp) will have a problem with it. Microsoft doesn’t seem to grok that true openness breeds trust. If it were submitting a truly open standard, it wouldn’t matter what anyone thought of the company submitting it.
It looks like Microsoft’s days of rolling over opposition with a superior lobbying budget and the lack of clear alternatives is over. It might actually have to play nicely now with the other children. Imagine that.
To me the question isn’t so much is the core business fading, but rather can its new businesses and related services like Xbox make up the difference? If Microsoft can iron out significant manufacturing problems with the Xbox 360, and keep its (very) healthy share of the server and corporate desktop markets, it’ll be ok for the next half decade. If not, watch out.
The main point I was trying to make is that when you compare Macs with comparably equipped Windows PCs, sometimes Macs beat Windows PCs in the price/performance comparison. Sometimes Windows PCs beat Macs. Overall, there’s relative parity.
Danger! Watch out for high capacity SanDisk CF cards going for “insane” prices, especially on eBay.
Fortunately, there are a number of tell- tale signs, which indicate a counterfeit CF card, though those committing the fraud are becoming increasingly good at disguising it.
As Apple CEO Steve Jobs defines one hot consumer product segment after another, slowly, almost imperceptibly, Apple is assuming the dominant position in the world of consumer tech.
And with its rise, so rises the lightning rod of criticism.
This quick excerpt from a CNN interview a couple days ago shows a moment of scrambling on Gate’s part when it’s suggested that Vista is like Mac OS X. In his response, Gates seems to imply that Vista’s applications are comparable to the Mac iLife apps, like iDVD or iMovie.
While not ruling out that possibility, I’ll believe it when I see it.
[youtube]NQmOmdYPKJQ[/youtube]
The iPod Shuffle now comes in orange (a new color for any iPod model) as well as 4 other colors. Here’s a good review by an iLounge.com editor of why the new Shuffles are better than the old, colors notwithstanding. Hint: it’s the earbuds, bud.
If they didn’t lack the bass response of the higher end Nano and iPod Video, I’d have been an owner back in November, when these amazing aluminum Shuffles were introduced.
Vista released… meh
Microsoft’s first new operating system in 5 years was released for retail sale yesterday. Eyes lifted briefly, then went back to television or work. Vista was previewed to death over the last couple years, and released to corporate clients over two months ago.
Many stores that had planned midnight showings were surprised at the lack of devotees queuing up to buy Vista. CompUSA’s premier store on San Francisco’s Market Street only saw a fraction of the 500-plus shoppers its manager had hoped for at the stroke of twelve. And in an unintentionally hilarious piece of irony, many of those who came to shop — including those at the head of the line — were there only for discounts on gadgets rather than Microsoft’s software darling. Similar stories surfaced in other parts of the US.
Suspense had been entirely bled from Vista, so yesterday’s release was a big yawn. Of course, accusations flew that Microsoft’s new OS is a ripoff of Mac OS. It would have been surprising if they didn’t fly. It’s happened with every version of Windows, to one degree or another.
Someone I know who works in [Apple] shipping said they recieved a high number of shipments, more then the usual amount, of apple products. But they weren’t allowed to open the boxes at all to count the number of products in their to be sure none were missing.
With less than a week until Steve Jobs takes the stage for a longer-than-usual 2 hour keynote speech at MacWorld 2007, rumors of new Apple products are in full banshee wail. As AppleSwitcher’s very own Fred N. remarked, even Apple seems to be hinting this MacWorld will be on par with the biggest MacWorlds in recent years.
iPhone? This would be the biggest announcement of any. The market for an iPod that takes calls is estimated to be massive. If it’s done right. Big if, but of all companies that can do it, Apple’s most likely to.
iTV? Also very big, if it were to occur, would be Apple’s full entry into the living room. The device would merge the PC with the television with the stereo with the movie and music collection with the iTunes Store. Not a small job that.
(Google search results for “iphone rumors” vs. “itv rumors” are currently running 4.5:1)
Neither? Something else? The iPhone rumor has been echoing through these halls for over 2 years, and every time it’s next year.
Certainly OS X 10.5 “Leopard” demonstrations will be in order, as will the usual announcements of upgrades to Apple products like the iLife family, iWork family, .Mac service, and Apple’s not-insubstantial line of professional creative software titles like Aperture and Final Cut. Mac Minis and Mac Pro lines stand to see a processor upgrade also.
In a way, Apple doesn’t have to release a thing this MacWorld because the massive attention from all the product release speculation (this very post, natch) and publicity will surely sell more iPods and Macs as is. But that’s part of the fun of early January every year — Apple raises the bar for itself, Jobs puts himself on the spot, and we see if he can possibly rise above it and top the speculation.
WP Cumulus Flash tag cloud by Roy Tanck requires Flash Player 9 or better.
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If big tech companies have to say something isn’t dead, that usually means one thing: it’s dead.
As Apple CEO Steve Jobs defines one hot consumer product segment after another, slowly, almost imperceptibly, Apple is assuming the dominant position in the world of consumer tech.
Suspense had been entirely bled from Vista, so yesterday’s release was a big yawn. Of course, accusations flew that Microsoft’s new OS is a ripoff of Mac OS. It would have been surprising if they didn’t fly. It’s happened with every version of Windows, to one degree or another.
