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Written on 21st November 2008
5 COMMENTS 
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
This morning, my Mac needed around four minutes to boot-up. No problem, I can wait that long. Had another zip from my coffee, scanned the frontpage of The Himalayan and chatted with the waiter. For a lot of people though, this morning ritual can have a serious impact on their daily lives.
Ok, these folks use Vista on a corporate pc, so it takes them approximately twenty minutes to boot-up their working devices. In the meantime, they have a smoke, catch up with colleagues, or “engage in other non-work activities”.
Those last words come from Richard Rosenblatt, a lawyer hired by US corporate giants like AT&T, United Health Group and Cigna. These stuck-up employers want to cut some costs by not paying their employees for this 20 minutes boot-up and log-off time.
Say that the average employee works 245 days a year. That means the plan of Rosenblatt will cost them around 82 hours (4900 minutes) in salary. No wonder the employees have hired lawyer Mark Thierman to ridicule and destroy this plan. US employees, stand up for your boot-up right!
[Via The Inquirer] [Photo credit: the great Thomas Hawk]
Written on 5th September 2008
6 COMMENTS
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
Here it is, the first episode of the Seinfeld/ Gates commercial series. It’s part of a $300 million Microsoft ad campaign, led by famous ad-agency Crispin Porter + Bogusky. It’s a product of Alex Bogusky’s extraordinary brain I can’t follow, ’cause the ad doesn’t get me excited yet. I realize that’s my own fault.
Crispin Porter + Bogusky is famous for its innovative and controversial ad campaigns for the Mini Cooper, Burger King, Molson and a recent mock porn movie made for Virgin Atlantic’s business travelers. Most of those ideas weren’t welcomed with warm applause either. Maybe this dull episode is the start of a surprisingly good and sophisticated series. It’s genius, but we, dazed and confused early adopters, don’t see it yet.
For now though, I’d like to quote Gizmodo’s Jason Chen:
Besides the slick and probably expensive editing designed to make Jerry Seinfeld look like the more awkward of the pair, there’s not a whole lot of special effects in this clip. In fact, there’s not really a whole lot of anything, including laughs, information or pimping of Vista.
Let’s see how we feel about this ad in a year.
Written on 31st July 2008
3 COMMENTS
Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten, Serial Internet Entrepreneur
Last March, Microsoft awarded its new $300 million consumer-branding campaign to ad-agency Crispin Porter + Bogusky. The agency is famous for its innovative and controversial ad campaigns for the Mini Cooper, Burger King, Molson and a recent mock porn movie made for Virgin Atlantic’s business travelers. Now Alex Bogusky, the guy who made Crispin Porter + Bogusky famous, is going to try to make Microsoft just as cool, or cooler, as Apple. Will they succeed? I read all about this story in a recent Fast Company issue and if you are interested in branding, Microsoft and/or Apple then I can highly recommend reading the article.
We are anxiously waiting for Microsoft’s next move. How cool will their next ad campaign be? Will it make fun of Apple? What are they thinking of? Well, it seems their first experiment is a new campaign called “The Mojave Experiment”, and it is something of a letdown.
Basically Microsoft has Punk’d a bunch of XP users by showing them Windows Vista and pretending it was their next Operating System. These users where filmed, shown some of its cool features and then the truth was revealed. The result is a bunch of security cam styled movies on a flashy website showing people pretending to be amazed with the great and innovative features this secret new operation system has to offer. The idea sucks, and the execution even more.
As Wil Shipley writes at his blog ‘Microsoft has managed to prove that if you have a friendly expert on a controlled machine (with Vista pre-installed) showing a carefully selected subset of Vista features to an ignorant XP user for a few minutes, the XP user will often say he finds Vista acceptable.’
In reality, finding 22 computer amateurs in July 2008 that haven’t even seen the highly publicised Windows Vista yet, just proves that their sudden change of heart about wanting something new means absolutely nothing. Yes, Microsoft, placebo’s work for a little while…
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