bszlachta's blog

No, not the Microsoft Watch website.

This Microsoft Watch.

In 2003, a Windows user who simply wanted to install Microsoft Moviemaker ran into the non-functioning Windows hell that plagues – well, nearly all Windows users. 

No, an everday rant like this isn't big news, but it's worth a read as a look at what's seriously wrong with the Windows experience. Things like this: "Someone decided to trash the one part of Windows that was usable? The file system is no longer usable. The registry is not usable. This program listing was one sane place but now it is all crapped up. But that is just the start of the crap..."

(I know, life isn't perfect across the street in Macland, but 99.9% of the time, this sort of software update is about as eventful on a Mac as eating a peach. Linux users, how about you?) 

Oh, by the way, who was the guy who couldn't get Windows to work? Name's Bill Gates, or something like that. Not that it matters.

The email, as reported by the Seattle Post-Intelligencer:
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Man gets Windows Vista to work with printer

Bwah-ha-ha! It's a news story! It's not The Onion, or some other parody site; it's a Seattle Post Intelligencer blog, and the story is real.

There's a photo as evidence that Vista actually will print, complete with caption: "Charles Walling prints from his Windows Vista PC."

You can't make this stuff up. : )

Funny tech news has been sparse. This one, though, just cracked me up:

All Your Coffee Are Belong To Us

"...the Jura F90 Coffee maker, with its honest-to-God Jura Internet Connection Kit, can be taken over by a remote attacker, who can cause the coffee to be weaker or stronger..."

The next Hollywood "Internets" flick: Not content with making our traffic signals go crazy and bringing down our computerized financial systems, evil foreign hackers are now toying with American hackers' caffeine supply...

Microsoft Acquires Navic Networks

What's funny about that? Nothing, really. I just liked the reporter's sentence below:

"The technical term for what Microsoft has achieved in search (at least in comparison to Google) is "squat." "

A MS exec only tried to inject a little more comedy, by stating:
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This is mildly interesting: Brand Tags, a site that asks visitors to play word association with commercial brands. You see a brand name and logo, and type in the first thing that comes to your mind. (In other words: Just what does "Clorox" mean to you, bub?)

Chukking in the responses is fun for a while, but then you want to see what everyone else has said about those brands. You can do that, selecting a name from a big alphabetical list; the page returned shows a "cloud view" of all tags that visitors have input, with size showing frequency of the tag. Big letters = popular tag.

As an amusing diversion on this fine day, let's look at three big names in tech. Scan the big-letter words in the shrunken images below to get a sense of how people view the brand:

(click on an image to go to the original and updated page)

Google	Apple	Microsoft

Hmm, what've we got? For Google, "evil" catches the eye; is that a genuinely negative view of Google, or a positive association with the company's famous "don't be evil" mantra, or just some funnin'? (What? People goofing around on the Internet?) Otherwise, there are plenty of positive word associations for the search giant.

Apple? Again, some positive words, especially "innovation" and "innovative", though "expensive" and "overpriced" sneak in there too. It's not a secret any more that Macs fare well against other makers' high-end PCs, but nor is that fact widely known, and the company's lack of low-end offerings keeps that "expensive" perception going strong.

And Microsoft? Well, "computers" came up big, and that isn't a bad brand association... but beyond that, methinks the company's PR team has some big, big work to do. I see one word writ large that's really a low blow. (I meant "s**t", not "windows".)

Interesting stuff, though I wouldn't read too much into it all. There's obviously some snarky "ballot-stuffing" going on in there; the site's creator laments as much. It's a clever idea, though, and if the jokesters could be weeded out, Brand Tags would be a nifty (and sometimes painful!) tool for marketers to see how their brands are perceived.

The Zune music player is probably not a topic on many people's radar, but given the Zune-specific origins of this site, here's a short double-header of music news:

My Dear John Letter from MSN Music
The shoe drops: MS officially tells its PlaysForSure customers to get bent.

Zune Sales Still In the Toilet
Well, not much need to explain that article's premise, is there.

You know, Zune probably isn't an awful product in terms of, say, falling apart or blowing up or just plain dying after a month... so, what is it that makes it so danged unpalatable? Like Vista, it just has this taint that goes beyond actual product flaws. All jokes and snark aside, it's truly a fascinating phenomenon to see.