Here at Crave, we occasionally like to crowd-source our humor.
Thursday, we learned that Jerry Seinfeld, one of the funniest men on the planet, will be the new spokesman in an ad campaign for Microsoft's Vista operating system. Can Seinfeld steal some of the marketing thunder from Apple's hipster Macintosh dude and the poor, shlubby Windows fella who clearly needs to get his suit tailored?
Well, as our readers have noted, there's a bit of irony to this, since many of us recall that Seinfeld was always using a Mac on his '90s sitcom. That got us thinking: Should Microsoft hire someone not so clearly playing both sides of the fence? Thankfully, our readers had some terrific ideas.
"Anyone from The Office would be more relevant to my internets," one reader said in pondering who the next Vista spokesman should be.
(Credit: NBC)• Our first commenter, "J-Hawaii," had a good suggestion, a Borg drone from Star Trek: The Next Generation. However, I'm not sure this is the best representative of Microsoft's business-first attitude. While we often think of the Borg as joyless automatons of a conformist culture, the best-known Borg, Seven of Nine in Star Trek: Voyager, added new femininity to cyber-kinetic life forms. Even the creepy Borg Queen in the movie Star Trek: First Contact had a certain je ne sais quoi about her.
Could a Borg offer the first sex appeal to a Microsoft ad campaign since the Rolling Stones were singing Start Me Up for Windows 95?
• Commentator "Dirk VanNerden," along with many others, suggests Steve Carell and the rest of the cast of The Office. Makes sense; you've got vaguely unhappy office folk stuck in workplace purgatory in Scranton, Penn. (I grew up about 20 miles from Scranton, so trust me: "purgatory" is a nice way to put it.) Total Microsoft stereotype. Nails it.
However, a Microsoft fan might point out that the cast of a Carell movie, The 40-Year-Old Virgin could work just as well for Apple. You know, gadget heads stuck forever in some sort of adolescent, video-game-playing, pot-smoking purgatory.
Here at Crave, we also like to be platform neutral with our insults.
... Read moreGuys, the joke's on us. Big time.
Bloggers have been chortling all day over a goofy video made for Microsoft's sales team that made its way onto YouTube.
The video, "Rocking Our Sales," by "Bruce ServicePack and the Vista Street Band," is painfully lame. How bad? A friend from IBM who viewed the video said it made him rip out his spleen. That's pretty bad.
In short order, Microsoft was getting pilloried for not having a clue about cool. The House of Gates was so square, it was beyond lame. Gizmodo put up a post titled "Internal Microsoft Vista Video is as Painful as Videos Get", while Engadget chimed in with "Microsoft burns our eyes with Vista promo video." Not to be outdone, CrunchGear added its 2 cents with "Don't shoot the messenger: Microsoft internal promo video about Windows Vista is hard to watch."
Truth be told, I thought pretty much the same thing. Only one problem. They were messing with your heads.
"This video was a spoof (believe it or not)," said a Microsoft representative familiar with the reason behind the production. Apparently, it was a way for Microsoft to have some fun at its own expense.
"They thought folks internally would get a kick out of not taking themselves so seriously all the time, but some people thought that's exactly what they were being--serious. Anyway, this little piece of art came to life and has caused quite a few laughs in Microsoft's hallways."
Who woulda thunk it?
HP's MediaSmart Receiver x280N streams media via a home network, or from an optional internal hard drive (shown on the right)
(Credit: HP)HP likes to hedge its bets. In addition to a couple of big-screen flat-panel TVs with built-in Media Center Extenders, the company is now offering a set-top box as well. Like the MediaSmart TVs, the MediaSmart Receiver x280N has the ability to stream a wide variety of video (including MPEG-2, DivX, WMV, WMV-HD, and H.264/MP4 files), audio (MP3, WMA, WMA-Pro, WAV, AAC/m4a), and images (JPEG, BMP, GIF, and PNG photos) from networked PCs to your living room TV via its wired Ethernet or wireless 802.11a/b/g/n connections. Local media playback is also available via plug-in USB drives or HP's own proprietary Pocket Media Drive (also found on many of the company's desktop PCs). The box boasts HDMI and component video output at HD resolutions up to 720p and 1080i. The MediaSmart Receiver x280N will connect easily to PCs running most flavors of Windows Vista--and will go head-to-head with very similar models from Linksys and D-Link when it becomes available later this year.
Mac Tablet
(Credit: Crave UK)Now that Crave UK has gone on record saying that it believes an Apple tablet is not only in the works, but sitting atop the list of Steve Jobs' future announcements, will it be capable of turning the tablet industry around?
Some may say that the future of tablets are bright because they are quite practical when you come right down to it. And while I agree that some of them can be useful, they haven't caught on because no one has any idea of how to get them to work. But if a company that has sold us on a new way of using a cell phone is getting in the business, it's difficult for me to count this tablet out.
... Read moreDon Reisinger is a technology columnist who has written about everything from HDTVs to computers to Flowbee Haircut Systems. Don is a member of the CNET Blog Network, and posts at The Digital Home. He is not an employee of CNET. Disclosure.
Leopard--the future of the OS market.
(Credit: CNET Networks)As many of you are aware, I think Windows Vista is a blunder. And with its annoying UAC system and horrifically slow operation, it won't take long before the majority of home users agree with me. If the recent figures showing Mac OS X is already gaining market share is any indication of the future, look for Leopard to outsell Vista by a staggering margin.
Simply put, Mac OS X Leopard is one of the most significant operating system achievements we have witnessed in years. Not only does it add functionality that Microsoft could only have dreamed of, it does so in a snappy environment that doesn't annoy you with pop-ups asking for permission or all of those security threats we have come to know (and hate) in Windows.
But my belief that Vista will soon bow to Leopard goes far beyond the operating system itself. In fact, the major reason Vista will succumb to Mac OS X has little to do with Apple, but quite a bit to do with Microsoft's current focus. Regardless of where you stand on the issue, one thing is abundantly clear: Microsoft fears Google and is doing everything it can to become the Google slayer instead of competing in its core business--software.
The company is on a slippery slope, and to be quite honest, I don't think it can get off too easily.
... Read moreDon Reisinger is a technology columnist who has written about everything from HDTVs to computers to Flowbee Haircut Systems. Don is a member of the CNET Blog Network, and posts at The Digital Home. He is not an employee of CNET. Disclosure.
Progress is measured in steps both big and small. The smaller ones may get less attention, but they are much easier to take.
It's been a year of big steps for Apple. The company dropped the "Computer" from its name in January as a way of showing Apple was no longer just about the Mac, and the clear priority for 2007 in Cupertino was to get the iPhone out the door and selling briskly. Then, perhaps for kicks, it decided to overhaul its entire lineup of iPods.
Later today, Apple will take a smaller step, with the launch of Mac OS X 10.5, code-named Leopard. Leopard's coming on scene later than expected, almost 30 months after Tiger (Mac OS X 10.4) launched in April 2005, in part due to the push to get the iPhone out in time. CNET'S review is in, and my colleagues Elsa Wenzel and Robert Vamosi are positive.
Leopard, the latest version of Mac OS X, goes on sale at 6 p.m. today wherever you live.
(Credit: Apple)There are dozens of important new features in Leopard, perhaps most notably the Time Machine application that could make it easier for users to back up and restore their files. Backing up your files is generally a simple exercise with a external hard drive, but Time Machine is interesting because of the friendly way in which it lets you restore files, flying back in time (and space) to the last instance in which that file was saved.
But all the reviewers, including Apple favorites Walt Mossberg at The Wall Street Journal and David Pogue at The New York Times, felt compelled to point out that Leopard is very much an evolution of previous versions of Mac OS X, and not a dramatic breakthrough like some past releases. It's certainly nothing like the tectonic shift Microsoft users went through in the switch from Windows XP to Vista, or Windows 98 to XP.
That can come off as a negative assessment. But it's not.
Computing trends change so quickly now: are you doing the same things with your Mac today that you were when Tiger was released in 2005? Maybe, but you're definitely capable of doing much more today, and even more so compared with when the first version of Mac OS X arrived in 2001. With Leopard, Apple will have made five major upgrades to the original Mac OS X operating system in six years.
Guess what other operating system made its debut in 2001. After the launch of Windows XP that year, it took Microsoft a well-documented eternity to release Vista, during which it changed its goals for the operating system several times and wound up releasing a solid, if underwhelming product earlier this year.
Here's the lesson: making smaller, more frequent changes to your product makes it much easier to stay on top of a changing industry than a five-year plan will ever allow. It keeps engineers on their toes and also makes the bean counters happy. That's because modest upgrades can be released more frequently that still have enough new bells and whistles to justify charging for the new software. A new copy of Leopard, for example, will set you back $129.
As my colleague Ina Fried noted to me as we watched the World Series on Wednesday night, Microsoft does make incremental changes to Windows. But it calls them service packs, and it gives them away for free. Apple sits in a happy middle, where it can make substantial--yet relatively modest--additions to Mac OS X, charge more than $100 each time, and have customers walk away satisfied that the upgrade was worth their time and money.
Of course, life is different for Microsoft. As they add new features, they have to make sure everything plays nicely with a 20-year history of code, so their business customers don't freak out. This makes it much harder for Redmond to turn on a dime to respond to new trends like mobility or multimedia.
Leopard's a run-scoring double, to stretch the baseball analogy. It's not a revolution in Mac software, but it's a nice advance for older Mac owners as well as those new to the company in the last year or so. If Apple can get back on the 12- to 18-month pace of new releases that CEO Steve Jobs told The Times he'd like to stick to over the next several years, Apple could be able to pick out the next trend in personal computing well ahead of Microsoft if the engineers in Redmond stay on their current schedule.
The age-old Apple-Microsoft debate is changing. Microsoft continues to run a very profitable business, and even if Apple continues to expand its Mac market share, Windows will remain by far the dominant PC operating system when this decade ends.
But Apple has more momentum, as the iPhone and iPod continue to make both the mobile phone and music industries take notice. It has more investment, now worth more than tech-industry stalwarts IBM and Intel but still well behind Microsoft. And it's more nimble, a crucial advantage as an era dominated by the PC comes to a close and something new takes its place.
I'm not touching the Vista versus Leopard question until I've had a chance to use them both more thoroughly. But is Leopard a more significant advance compared to Tiger than Vista is compared to Windows XP? Nope. And Jobs is probably fine with that.
(Credit:
Crave UK)
You can call Microsoft many things--but you definitely can't call it boring. Or sane. In a fit of undeniable lunacy, Bill Gates' staff invited us to jump out of a plane last week, so that we could experience some new features in Vista. It didn't make any sense then, and it makes even less sense now.
According to Microsoft's public relations guy, the idea was to film us skydiving, and then send our adrenalin levels through the roof by letting us edit the footage in Windows Movie Maker. Stupidly, we went along, and this accompanying video is proof that we've no regard for our own personal safety, and a distinct lack of common sense.
Would you jump out of a plane with the same people that made Windows ME? And the Zune? Watch the death-defying footage here.
(Source: Crave UK)
Be patient, Vista Ultimate owners. That's what Microsoft is telling those who plunked down for the flagship version of Vista. One of the selling points of Vista Ultimate--aside from combining the multimedia-friendly features of Home Premium with the security features of Vista Business--was the BitLocker encryption tool and the promise of exclusive Vista Ultimate Extras. As Justin Hutchinson, the Group Product Manager for Vista, stated in his guest spot during Bill Gates's CES keynote in January, Microsoft would roll out Ultimate Extras "on a regular basis."
Ultimate Extras: Out of stock
(Credit: Ars Technica)To date, only four Ultimate Extras have been released: a Hold 'Em poker game, a BitLocker prep tool, 16 language packs, and a preview of DreamScene--a video desktop background. There's still no sign of GroupShot, a photo-editing tool Hutchinson mentioned at the CES keynote. And of the four available Extras, only one--the DreamScene beta--was introduced since Vista's release over five months ago. It's hardly the exciting collection of extras that would help justify the extra money spent on Vista Ultimate, and Ultimate owners are rightfully upset.
The cries reached Redmond, and Barry Goffe, Microsoft's Director of Windows Vista Ultimate, offered this apology yesterday:
"We want to let our Windows Vista Ultimate customers know that we are actively working to deliver the remaining Extras that we identified in January. Our goal is to provide the highest-quality, most secure and reliable offerings, and as a result we are continuing our work on these offerings. We apologize for taking so long to provide a status update to customers.
We intend to ship Windows DreamScene and the remaining 20 Language Packs by the end of the summer. We will not ship the last two Extras showcased in January (Windows DreamScene and the remaining 20 Language Packs) until they meet the high quality bar required by our enthusiastic customers--and we believe that we can achieve that bar by the end of this summer.
We also intend to deliver additional Extras in the future. In addition to Windows DreamScene and the remaining Language Packs, we plan to ship a collection of additional Windows Ultimate Extras over the next couple years that we are confident will delight our passionate Windows Vista Ultimate customers. We cannot identify dates or provide details at this time--but once we ship Windows DreamScene and the remaining Language Packs, we will provide more information about the next Extras."
While it's encouraging to see Microsoft acknowledge the delays and offer a mea culpa for the lack of communication to its Vista Ultimate customers, it would have been even more appreciated had it offered more details on even a few of the Ultimate Extras it's currently developing, and a more concrete schedule for future rollouts. I think Vista Ultimate owners are looking for more than a final version of DreamScene and additional language packs as we approach Vista's six-month anniversary.
(Via Ars)
(Credit:
Microsoft)
If Microsoft hadn't issued a press release on this new keyboard, we honestly would never have been able to pick it out of its growing crowd. Even then, the company's product nomenclature doesn't make it easy to distinguish one item from the next: The product in question is the "Wireless Laser Desktop 4000," for example, not to be confused with the "Wireless Optical Desktop 4000" or the "Wireless Laser Desktop 6000."
Whatever it's called, the new keyboard-mouse package is part of the wave of Vista hardware continuing to reach the market now that the long-delayed operating system is finally here. Among its features are a "Windows Start Button" designed for fast document or Web search, a "Windows Live Call Button" for instant messaging or video calls and a "Windows Gadget Button" for news, weather, stock quotes and other information. (Did we mention Windows?)
The $80 price seems fairly reasonable if you've installed Vista and really like punching buttons. But we're still trying to figure out how to use the baffling functions of Microsoft Word, so the last thing we want to do is learn a bunch of new hardware commands.
(Credit:
Caroline McCarthy/CNET)
(Credit:
Caroline McCarthy/CNET)
This morning, despite subzero temperatures and a wicked wind chill, a crowd of press, special guests, and Windows Vista beta testers from around the world showed up in Manhattan's post-industrial West Chelsea neighborhood to watch a rather unusual spectacle: a troupe of aerial dancers on the side of the Terminal Building, clad in spandex bodysuits, bouncing around on bungee cords, and forming the Vista and Office 2007 logos. It's all part of the massive Vista launch festivities that are going on all day in NYC leading up to the operating system's consumer debut tomorrow.
Not exactly what you'd expect from Gates, Ballmer, and company. But Microsoft is determined to promote Vista as truly different and innovative, and if the aerial performance by NYC's Grounded troupe is any indicator, it certainly will be.
