Posts Tagged ‘microsoft’
Are You A PC?
Last night, my co-worker, Adam and I were talking about the new “I am a PC” campaign that was launched by Microsoft in response to the Mac v. PC ads from Apple.
Overall, we had thought it was an interesting response to Apple and a good campaign. However, Adam brought up a good point – what next? Didn’t it feel like there should be something else.
Where was the integration of media – online display advertising, PPC, email – anything involving social networking. Where were the banner ads on the New York Times? Low and behold – this morning, I received an email from Microsoft (see the inset image) touting their new website – I Am A PC – Life Without Walls. The company has also refaced their Windows homepage to reflect the campaign.
My thoughts – it is a decent start, but it has the not-as-slick-as-Apple feel to it. It doesn’t bleed the edge, but more or less treads already broken ground. I mean, it is just an email and a website that lets you load photos. Saying that – this represents the world of the PCs – which Microsoft doesn’t make. Don’t forget, they just build the operating systems and software. You don’t need to be cutting edge. You need to be good enough. You need to be affordable, reliable. So maybe the campaign got the image right.
It will be interesting to see if Microsoft and their agency, Crispin Porter + Bogusky can amp up the social network factor and find a new edge to cut.
Microsoft Uses Internet Photos . . without permission
Hello All – I am about to take over the View from W6th blog, but I thought I would post some parting words that I received from Dave Mead via email.
So Microsoft is behind a website called Iconic Britain. It’s a competition site being used to promote Live Search. Quite a few people are getting up-in-arms over it as it seems Microsoft is storing the images on their own server and have not asked anyone’s permission. This differs slightly from Google as they link back to the original.
Also if your photo is chosen the person who chose it will win the prize, not you, as they have stripped all attribution and meta data away from the image.
If I put “optiem” in as the search term I get one page of results. These thumbnails range from photos I’ve tagged in Flickr with “optiem” to imagery I know we’ve used in designs for the Botanical Gardens blog, Cleveland Clinic Office of Civic Education, Sherwin-Williams, and a few others.
You can read more at http://www.pro-imaging.org/content/view/374/173/ and on Flickr at http://www.flickr.com/groups/lomo/discuss/72157606451896398/.
Not sure if anyone will sue, or even if they have a right to, but I just found this a possible PR boo-boo by MS.
Day of .NET
Thanks to Linda for forwarding this. Cleveland is taking part of the “Day of .NET” and details can be found over at http://clevelanddodn.org/.
Subjects to covered are Silverlight, Semantic Web and Sharepoint. Might be worth a look.
Behold IE8!
So on Tuesday I came into the office to an email from Brent announcing Microsoft’s u-turn on IE8’s default behavior. Great news for us developer types as that now means that we wouldn’t have to start using ‹meta› tags to force IE8 to act, well, like IE8.
Today, at MIX’08, Microsoft unveiled IE8. Thanks to Jeremy Keith & Jonathan Snook’s tweets I got the latest on webslices and the link to download the beta—which I promptly did.
Now if you are running Vista it seems IE8 installs pretty quickly. I, on the other hand, run XP Pro and had to install a couple of “critical” things from Microsoft and then do two restarts. Some things never change.
After that IE8 runs pretty nicely. It doesn’t look a lot different from the current IE7, but I assume that may change a little nearer launch. A couple of things that are different are the “emulate IE7” button (which requires the browser to restart) and a developer tools button which launches a new window with built-in tools akin to Pederick’s web developer toolbar or Hewitt’s Firebug add-on.
I’m going to be trying it out over the coming weekend and hopefully getting some more insights at SXSW.
Technorati tags: ie8, microsoft, browser, beta
Popfly could let everyone mash-up…
There’s something new over at the Microsoft camp, it could be very cool, and it’s name is Popfly.
Now I don’t have an invite so I’m only going by what I’ve read on the Popfly site and other blogs but it does seem that this is a lot like Yahoo! Pipes on steroids.
The promise is that you will use the set of online visual tools to create mashups, gadets and even web pages. You’ll be able to share them with other users by grabbing the code and getting the user to add them within an Iframe on their site (something I personally hate but if it’s good enough for Google). Making use of Silverlight, is a step forward and makes the whole thing look slick. There is also the Popfly Explorer which works with Visual Studio.
Watch the Popfly how-to video for a better look at how it works.
I’m strangely divided about this offering from Microsoft. Personal experience with the software they’ve offered, in the past, for building anything on the web has never put out anything but a ton of over-complicated junk, but their tools are easy to pick up and ubiquitous and the teams have now made great strides in cleaning up their output. This could be a great tool to extend the web from the root users up, but it could also be the arbiter harbinger of the return of sensory overload homepages so prevalent in the 90′s.