One of my blogging goals is to shift the focus away from dry technology to people, whether they be innovators or consumers. Focus should be the people and the stories they tell. That’s what Oddly Together is really about. Today’s unexpected Microsoft layoffs—800 employees—is good opportunity to tell stories.
TechFlash’s Todd Bishop and I disagree about what constitutes an ad. I ask you which of us is right. The disagreement started over Todd’s post “Windows Ads, Finally Cool?” He reports about some Windows 7 videos that popped up online a few days ago.
I saw the same vids on Tuesday night and almost blogged about them. But I recalled reading something a few weeks ago (from the esteemed Long Zheng) about the same videos being produced conceptually for Microsoft. Also, the run times were all wrong for broadcast. Nobody airs a 51-second commercials. I dismissed the videos as YouTube-distributed marketing material, but not advertisements.
There’s something dirty feeling about watching Michael Arrington’s interview of Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer. I don’t mean that as criticism of Michael; plenty of other folks have done that all too well. It’s this new media thing, where you sleep with the people you write about. You do business with them and for them.
Who am I to criticize? The new media thing is working out rather well for TechCrunch, which makes oodles of money, commands huge traffic and pageview numbers and mingles with Silicon Valley’s dealers and stealers.
The pull is enough for Steve to sit down with Michael for a video interview. The CEO isn’t talking to the New York Times or Wall Street Journalhere, but to TechCrunch.
That’s the question Todd Bishop (accompanied by John Cook) asked people on the streets of Seattle about six months ago. No one seemed to know what was Microsoft’s search engine (At that time is was Windows Live). But the two TechFlash reporters asked again yesterday afternoon in front of Seattle Public Library. The results were surprisingly different.
Most everyone could name Bing as Microsoft’s search engine. The difference is marketing—and plenty of it. Advertising works, and Microsoft should keep it up and continue to improve Bing along the way. Since Microsoft’s Online Services Businesses is losing gobs of money, anyway, the company should put those losses to good use by keeping the advertising alive and vital.
Do you have a search story that you’d like told? Please email Joe Wilcox: oddlytogether at gmail dot com.
It’s not the first encounter. But this time, I fought back.
Last week, someone tweeted that I had been Fake Steved. Over at Betanews I had blogged: “Why I chose Windows 7 Over Snow Leopard (and you should, too).”
For Fake Steve (aka, journalist Dan Lyons) that translated into post title: “Borg lapdog says you should choose Windows 7 over Snow Leopard.”
The netbook scourge continues unabated, and PC manufacturers are host on their on petard. Could anything be more putrid?
DisplaySearch has ruined the last official day of summer holiday by releasing netbook shipment data. In May, I blogged that netbook US retail share approached 20 percent. Fire all the short-sighted product managers! The netbook scourge advances on the mainstream computing market, cannibalizing all margins in its path. Netbooks—or in DisplaySearch parlance “mini-notes”—accounted for 22.2 percent of worldwide portable shipments in the second quarter. That’s just the bad. The worse: Netbook shipments grew 40 percent year over year, or nearly twice notebooks.
Say, do you remember Sheila Dvorak? The filmmaker who bought an HP HDX 16t, in one of those Microsoft “Laptop Hunters” commercials? The stereotypical filmmaker uses a Mac, running Apple’s Final Cut Studio. But not Sheila. She’s completed her first project using the HDX 16t.
She wrote in comments today: “In case your blog readers are interested. I completed my first project, edited entirely on my new laptop. Check it out, and if you live in LA, the workshop is great.”
At time of purchase, HP listed the preconfigured model—with 2.4GHz processor, 16-inch display (1366 x 768 resolution), 4GB of RAM, 512MB (dedicated) nVidia GeForce 9600M GT graphics, 500GB hard drive and Windows XP Home Premium 64-bit—for $1,099.99.
Embedded above is the documentary short, “Yoga in Action,” that Sheila refers to. She writes her screenplays in Final Draft and video edits, get this, in Adobe Premiere Elements. The video software is considered consumer grade, but Sheila puts it to commercial use. Not bad, eh?
Hey, is that Sheila in her own video? These director cameos—you gotta love `em.
Do you have a PC buying story that you’d like told? Please email Joe Wilcox: oddlytogether at gmail dot com.
Last Friday’s Silicon Alley Insider Chart of the Day should scare Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer so badly that he accidentally buys a Japanese car. Sorry, Steve, you missed the Cash for Clunkers program. That’s OK, maybe someday the Obama Administration will offer a clunkers program for Windows PCs.
Silicon Alley Insider’s Dan Frommer explains the chart: “By the end of 2011, worldwide smartphone sales will pass worldwide PC sales, RBC analyst Mike Abramsky estimates, approaching 400 million annual shipments of each.” Say, Gartner or IDC, how about you pipe in with some estimates, too, eh?
Too Many people are making too much about ComScore’s searcher penetration data, which released on August 14. Microsoft and Yahoo executives shouldn’t get their hopes up, nor should analysts, bloggers or journalists writing about the data otherwise be misguided. Similarly, ComScore has overstated Microsoft-Yahoo combined search potential.
It’s no secret that Google is the US search leader, with 65 percent share in June, according to ComScore. Yahoo and Microsoft, respectively, had 19.6 percent and 8.4 percent search share. ComScore wrongly combines the share to get 28 percent (I’ll explain why it’s wrong later).
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