Dan Gillmor on WinXP

A reader writes:There's a new column from Dan Gillmor on SiliconValley.com about Windows XP. The column calls for an injunction stopping the shipping of WinXP. Dan's got a well thought out list of reasons why and how it would work."

Comments

The Kitty Kelly Tactic

[Zeinfeld]

A while back Kitty Kelley wrote a biography of Nancy Reagan creating a new litterary genre, the nasty-ography. The people in the media who thought Reagan a complete fool loved the book and it pretty much reversed the growing Reagan myth for a while until the dope's Altzheimer's disease became public.

Then Kelley tried to repeat the trick and wrote a book about the UK Royal familly, oh dear. The problem was not that people did not want to hear bad things about the Royals, quite the contrary, after the soap opera divorces, familly feuds etc. the monarchy had become very unpopular. But Kelley's book made a whole series of unsubstantiated tabloid rumours that the Buck house PR team could explode with little difficulty. At the very time when the country was sickened by their reaction to Princess Diana's death the Kitty Kelley nasty-ography brought them undeserved sympathy.

I think that the Gillmore article and others like it are likely to cause the same reaction. It is very noticable that the Slashcrew have got seriously out of sync with the readership on this one. Most of the posts are saying 'why give us this ill informed made up crap?".

After all if we are going to start attacking MSFT on the basis of made up stuff it might as well be good made up stuff.