Patrick's Rants

There is a joke that has been on the internet for quite a while. It goes something like this, “without walls and fences, who needs Windows^TM or Gates?” And now, Microsoft’s own advertising campaign is, “Life without walls.” That means we don’t need Windows.

Vista blog
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The latest Mac commercial has “PC” sitting at a table with his accountant eye shade on. We hear him as he’s moving money from a smallish pile of money to two other piles,

“advertising, advertising, advertising. Fix Vista. Advertising, advertising, advertising. Fix Vista.”

The pile for advertising is huge while the pile to fix Vista is quite small. Mac asks him about the piles and PC tells him that he has to spend a lot of money on marketing Vista leaving little to fix the bugs that exist in Vista – which might make it a product that people actually would want to buy. PC looks at the stacks and begins to ask if the “fix” pile might not be enough to fix all the bugs in Vista and motions his hands as if moving the marketing money into the fix pile. PC looks at the piles and says, “you’re right” and moves all of the money to the marketing pile.

Inside and outside allergies are no match for Claritin as the man chiseling away on his sculpture tells us.

A sharp mind is more important that a sharp chisel

And…

If I sneeze, this guy could lose his nose

What you don’t see when the guy is creating all kinds of dust and debris is a dust mask – you know, that could go a long way towards reducing the allergy problem buddy. At least he uses safety glasses when he’s using his power tools.

Coworkers are car pooling to work. The driver has a Jack in The Box holiday ball stuck to his forehead on some kind of suction cup device. He explains that he doesn’t have an antenna so he has to do something else. As the commercial comes to an end the fine print states, “Don’t drive with antenna balls stuck to face.” Great – there goes my holiday spirit

Despite all of Microsoft’s ‘hard work’ to bring Vista to the masses, it is an utter failure. If they didn’t have that (illegally maintained) monopoly, they probably wouldn’t have sold a single copy of this dog of an operating system. Apple has several great commercials poking fun at the woolly mammoth of operating systems. The first, released around the time Vista first came out, talked about the new ‘security’ dialog boxes. Windows pops up numerous dialog boxes asking the user to “Allow or Deny” many different activities. Following that was the upgrade commercial with the PC getting ready for major surgery to be usable for Vista.

Now there are the spokesperson commercials.

PC: People have been choosing to downgrade to XP.
Spokesperson: By “downgrade”, we mean that users are choosing to “upgrade” to an older more familiar experience.

In another one, the PC is giving a speech

PC: My fellow Americans, if Vista doesn’t support your printer, I say buy a new printer!

and then as an aside he tells the ‘Mac’ that he downgraded to XP three weeks earlier.

At first, Microsoft attempted to force their users to upgrade to Vista but terminating sales and support of XP, but by June a glimmer of hope began to shine, as XP (slightly)easier to get. That doesn’t mean they weren’t still pushing Vista as hard as possible, they just quietly continued to offer XP. It has even been suggested that Microsoft should abandon Vista, if only to save itself.

Finally, due to heavy demand Microsoft is forced to keep offering XP.

Of course they were still fighting against offering a “better” alternative going head to head with a Dutch consumer group in that asked for free XP CDs. An interesting twist to Vista’s security – if it can be called interesting – is that new hardware deactivates Vista. Actually, it’s not just new hardware, but driver upgrades as well – keep the same hardware and it can still deactivate on you.

So Vista Sales are still lackluster, so much so that companies may just skip Vista.

And finally, another survey highlights business concern about migration

What can we draw from all of this? Microsoft needs to stop treating its customers like thieves, disabling the operating system because someone adds a printer.

In a local twist to the Honda Mr. “O” commercials, Flagstaff Honda¹ ends their commercials with the slogan, “Where you come first.”

Way to go Mr. “O”.

1. I would link to their web site, but it relies heavily on flash and has a funky layout that looks like crap on my screen.

T-Mobile has been running a number of decent commercials for their new Fave 5 plan.

One involves the big brother who walks up to table where his younger brother is sitting and he picks up the phone sitting in the middle of the table. He looks at it and laughs to his friends, “it’s all animals. A horse (horsey looking girl bites a carrot) a turtle (boy in a “shell” jacket tucks his head a little deeper) giraffe (all we see is a neck on screen) (and I’ve missed one here somewhere) a pig. (big brother looks around…) Which one’s the pig? Snort! Who’s the pig? Snort! Snort! (cut to little brother’s friends smirking and giggling)”

In the next one, dad walks into the living room where everyone has their cell phones sitting on the coffee table, and says, “with Fave 5 and all five of our phones we can call 26 people.”

His kids immediately correct him, “dad that’s only 25.”

“So sad,” he says looking at them. “Think about it, carry the nine.”

As he leaves the room mom says, “this is why you should stay in school.”

In a commercial for Direct TV an actor plays as an investigative reporter stating, “cable claims satellite is unreliable” due to weather, etc. They then fly over the cable distribution center where there are a dozen or so satellite dishes – where cable gets their programming from. Good enough for the cable company, good enough for the consumer.

Honda has this cartoon character named “Mr Opportunity”. One wonders what they are really advertising when we see and hear women excitedly exclaim, “it’s good to have you back Mr. O”. And guys give the two thumbs up, “way to go Mr. O”

He finishes up with, “I’m Mr. Opportunity, and I’m knocking.”

The latest commercial from Burger King has to make you wonder. Are the ad agencies popping ‘shrooms or what? The creepy king is dancing a jig in his tights in front of the fake background images photographers use. We cut back and forth to people eating some kind of texas burger while the announcer says, “feed that mustache son”. Everyone eating the burgers gets an instance over sized mustache, including women and a dog (who only licked the wrapper).

I think the message they’re trying to send is the burger makes you feel like a cowboy, but I’m not sure if we aren’t subliminally getting, our cows have “lots of testosterone”, or even “we give our animals huge amounts of hormones that will make even a dog grow a cowboy sized mustache.”

For the safety of the public, and to satisfy a late lunch urge, I had one of these burgers and nothing happened to my mustache.