Comments on: Microsoft's new "I'm a dork" store

Microsoft has a new store, and it's a terrible reflection on a company that is otherwise smart, successful, and creative.

[Zandora777]

Yeah, I was at WinHEC and they were handing these things out if you filled out a survey. I threw the blank survey away in the trash, and remarked to some people about wondering why anyone in the world would want to wear one of those.

[perspectoff]

I think i was at that event. Bunch of finance chefs cooking up a gumbo, all wearing "I'm a PC Dork" hat while tossing in old computer parts that no longer run due to recent automatic upgrades on their Microsoft machines.

[johnwest72]

Wow. "I'm a Microsoft critic" is the understatement of the year. Matt, your blog should be named "I hate Microsoft". That way you'd at least be honest about your blog's intentions. Instead, you hide your bias behind the shroud of open-source. What's worse is that you have a vested interest in seeing Microsoft fail, seeing as their Sharepoint product is vastly superior to Alfresco's, the *company you're a VP* of. There couldn't be a more open-and-shut case of ongoing bias.

News.com, it's too bad you choose to continue to carry his blog. Is he really the best representation of open source you could find? If true, it's sad.

Fortunately, with FeedRinse, I will be filtering his stories out of my RSS feed from now on. I can't believe I went and signed up for a service like this just to rid my feeds of this farce.

John

[The_Decider]

Sharepoint superior?

LOL

[Matt Asay]

My bias is clear on the disclaimer below every post, and to the right (see right). I have never tried to hide it, nor have I ever hid my admiration of SharePoint. Try doing a Google search and you'll see.

Regardless, in case you didn't notice, the post was complimentary to Microsoft. It's a good company. Why does it have to create a lame image with dumb marketing? Please re-read my post.

[cowatson]

May I ask what this store has to do with the subject of your blog, which if I read correctly is "the business and politics of open source?"

[kennonk]

"seeing as their Sharepoint product is vastly superior to Alfresco's, the *company you're a VP* of. There couldn't be a more open-and-shut case of ongoing bias. "

Heh...the only thing Sharepoint is vastly superior to a poke in the eye with a sharp stick. And the only people who make ridiculous statements like that are **** MCSE's who make their living fleecing people by implementing and/or administrating horrid 'dependence-ware' like Sharepoint.

"There couldn't be a more open-and-shut case of ongoing bias. "

It's a blog dude...If this was some kind of factual news it would be on msnbc.com....oh wait no it wouldn't.

[johnwest72]

"**** MCSEs"? Wow. Very intellectual post. I couldn't dream of coming up with any sort of rebuttal.

[The_Decider]

It was accurate.

MCSE the lowest common denominator of the tech world, if you can actually call MCSE technical.

[daftkey]

Johnwest and Kennok - Wow - both of you sure know how to display some semblance of balance in your posts. Both with exaggerated claims and nothing to back them up.

Nice. I'll admit Matt is a little one-sided, but at least he's a little smarter than to make a claim without backing it up.

[softwaredesignengineer]

Most of you computer scientists geek types are missing it again. The "I'm a PC" ads (except for the Jerry & Bill ones) have been clicking pretty well with general users. I see kids and 20 year olds even post videos on Facebook and talk about it and put it on their comment status. Once again, Microsoft is reaching out to its user base - layman users.

I can understand why Matt finds this "dorky". It's because he's a computer scientist with that typical geek mentality. But look beyond the computer scientist syndrome and you see laymen users love it and identify with the "I'm a PC" brand (yes, brand. Interesting isn't it).

Matt is also wrong on something else too - Microsoft is not letting Apple define it. Microsoft sat back and let that happen with the "I'm a Mac" ads for quite sometime. Microsoft is now giving Apple a taste of it's own medicine making lay computer users identify themselves with the PC. If Apple tries to challenge that, they're in effect saying lay computer users are stupid. Looking at the response, lay computer users love it.

You guys need to get out of your computer scientist geeky syndrome and look at things from the user lay perspective.

And none of the suggestions by Matt such as "world's economy being written in Office? "That memo that Hank Paulson just sent to the world's finance chiefs? Written in Word." Or highlighting that the world's youth are growing up with its XBox gaming consoles? Or something that demonstrates that Microsoft is a leader, not a follower?" click with the general user better than the that 3 worded Ad.

It might work with the geeky or corporate crowd and Microsoft does that pretty well. But they've targetting another segment so instead of using your left side, you might to look at the larger picture.

[The_Decider]

Microsoft is a follower. That is all they know.

For once they are being honest in their advertising. Shame on you for calling them out on their honesty.

As for the lame hats and t-shirts, well its customer base is rather ignorant and trailor-trashy in general, and those people eat this sort of crap up.

So they are honest in advertising and appealing to their base. What more do you want?

[hobbes1311]

A bit rough to say 95 percent of computer users are Trashy... Mac commercials are just as trashy, in their attempts to "not attack the competition" they are doing just that. But no worries, as for the hats and shirts... they are only lame if you cant pull em off.

[softwaredesignengineer]

>>As for the lame hats and t-shirts, well its customer base is rather ignorant and trailor-trashy in general, and those people eat this sort of crap up.

Exactly the attitude that makes Linux suck at the desktop.

[odubtaig]

Not exactly true. The_Decider does constantly lay into Ubuntu while singing the praises of SUSE like he was getting paid for it (and thinks there's no difference between a cluster and a mainframe) but he's not even remotely representative. Actually, he makes me look reasonable which is an interesting achievement.

The real reason Linux sucks on the desktop? Apart from Canonical no-one in a position to do anything about it cares. The core Linux developers are interested purely in server performance, Red Hat has officially abandoned the desktop and whatever Novell are up to is anyone's guess but they only seem to sell to enterprises these days while treating their free distribution as an extremely experimental testbed where they can throw any old crap out, much like Red Hat used to do with Fedora until it bit them on the arse (several times).

Until recently, no-one's believed there's any money in Linux for the desktop so no-one's been paid to do it.