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Microsoft Battles Vista Perception With Prizes
LambAndMint writes "In what can only be described as an act of utter desperation to overcome Vista's mostly negative public perception issues, Microsoft has put together an online "Fact or Fiction" quiz about Windows Vista. Every person who submits themselves to Microsoft indoctrination gets a free shirt and the chance to win a $15,000 prize. Some of the supposed 'facts' will make you feel like you're reading a document from an alternate reality. Get ready to get a job as a computer salesman for a mass-market retailer as you go through the quiz."
The grand prize includes a multitude of Sony products. *sniff* I can smell the conspiracy theorists from here!
Wow...every single one of their "answers" is exactly wrong. I figured they'd toss in at least one or two that were real...but no!
I'm sick of following my dreams. I'm just going to ask where they're goin' and hook up with 'em later.
Ain't that the truth, I read a pretty good article that looked into the windows source code that leaked a while back. It appeared to be pretty well written code, and a lot of the comments lead one to believe the programmers were treated fairly well. I think the code that leaked was Win2k stuff, so what's happened since then is anyones guess.
I'm sick of following my dreams. I'm just going to ask where they're goin' and hook up with 'em later.
The Fact or Fiction site was put together by Microsoft Australia for "technology professionals" and aims to help Windows tech experts sell Vista to their customers. This is not oriented toward the general public, and frankly it doesn't look "desperate" to me.
Sure Vista has been a disappointment, but not everything Microsoft does is evidence of this.
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
Have you ever talked with Microsoft marketing people?
Sure did, and was sharp that day.
We were at an internal technology presentation, showing off what we do. Being security, we had our BSD, UNIX loggers and appliances on screens for everyone to see. We had a "tail -f syslog" and other logs just a moving every bad event across the screen in real time. Many called it similar to matrix.
Along comes the CFO and the Microsoft sales guy. And asked me, I haven't seen that before what is it. I said it was OpenBSD firewall logs on the vendor net. He said "OpenBSD what? That isn't an OS, is it? BSD what? Is that LSD?" with a smile (He knew).
I looked at our CFO and said, OpenBSD, the operating system we use to keep our Microsoft systems from getting wormed, infected and controlled by others. We also use it for firewalls, detection and system login because they cost less, run longer and don't requires the costly hand care to keep them going as does Microsoft Windows. We don't have the staff, software or capital budget for Microsoft.
Rubbed it right in. My manager heard from the CFO 2 days later, he was impressed and got a second tour with my manager. And a budget increase and authorization to use BSD and open source, in writing to the executive staff.
Try telling that to my parents, whose HP printer and scanner won't work with the copy of Vista that was preinstalled on the Dell they bought a few months ago. There's nothing wrong with the hardware, but because the Win2K/XP drivers for those devices won't work with Vista and HP hasn't gotten around to writing Vista drivers for them (and, in the case of their ScanJet 4p, probably never will), they're stuck with some POS Dell all-in-one that should work with Vista, but usually doesn't because of the craptastic drivers that came with it.
(If there's a silver lining in here, it's that they won't ever buy a Dell again. I tried talking them into buying a Mac, but they wouldn't listen to me. Dad was worried about not being able to open Office files; that there are plenty of apps for the Mac that open Office files (including...um...Office itself) didn't appear to register.)
20 January 2017: the End of an Error.