Creating cognitive dissonance is an interesting perspective on the Switch advertisments, but I've encountered more Mac users who experienced cognitive dissonance (myself included) than Windoze users.
Granted, the Mac does things well and easily, but it's hard to beat the jealosy of seeing your PC friends being able to buy the latest 3D card or gadget/peripheral whenever they want, inexpensively. While Mac support is much better than it used to be, it will never be up there with Windows.
In fact, I know people who are happier with their Windows PCs after switching from Mac (not just myself either). The main reason is the higher availability of the software and hardware they want to play with. They'll never switch back to Mac. [On a personal note, I'd consider using OSX if it ran on x86 hardware, but I will never buy proprietary Apple hardware ever again.]
I don't know many Windows users who are jealous of Mac owners for anything other than having nice looking systems, much less anyone who loses sleep over it.
There are multiple facets to success in advertising, and ultimately it comes down to Apple's marketing goals (which nobody here is talking about). If the goal is awareness and to win awards, then yes, their campaign is arguably successful.
A lot of advertising is about reducing cognitive dissonance-- i.e., making existing customers feel better about their purchase. I think that's what the Switch campaign is all about -- and they're probably successful here.
But the name of the campaign is "Switch", so perhaps the true acid test should be about conversion of Windows users to Mac users, can it be declared a success? I wonder how much they spend per conversion (formula: total ad dollars divided by total converts attributing switch to the campaign).
Seeing newer, faster x86 hardware with more available software and cheaper expansion options being released monthly for the x86 platform is bound to make a few people jealous. A typical Mac user's response is "Well, Apple's new chip at the end of next year is going to kick your PC's ass!" Duh. As a former Mac user, saying that never made me feel much better about waiting 3 quarters for a faster chip that came in a machine that I couldn't afford to switch to. I upgrade my x86 hardware every year for a fraction of what Mac upgrades used to cost me.
With the progress that the Linux world has made in usability, I just happily "switched" my notebook from Win2K to Red Hat 8. I don't know how much longer OSX users can brag about their switch campaign, because guess what? My switching cost to the Mac platform would cost me $3000 more because I have to buy new hardware. Switching to Red Hat cost me nothing but a few hours of download and installation time.
Don't forget why Graffiti was created. It began as an alternative software package to the flawed handwriting package on the Newton. I remember paying for Graffiti on the original Newton, because I could enter text in twice as fast as with the native recognition.
Of course, Graffiti became Palm, and the rest is history.
To kill two birds with one stone, you should just integrate a Mindstorms robot with a vacuum cleaner and a Flowbee attachment. Then you could use it to cut your hair and lawn.
Now I know what David Wiseman's day job was. Instead of cracking funny jokes while teaching Comp Sci 020 in the evenings at UWO (Introduction to Pascal) in 1989, I always wondered what he did during the daytime. Little did I know he would on a mission to "save" the USENET...
One thing I remember about him was that way back then, his desktop wallpaper on his Sun workstation had a huge picture of his face (noteworthy only because he had what was then considered to be a giant screen monitor - maybe a 17"?) -- that was pretty funny.
The other noteworthy thing I remember about him was that 2% of our exam mark came from putting our name and student number correctly on the exam booklets.
If you look at the original post, TechSearch is suing a known patent critic simply because he has a web site. He's not selling a web server or web browser. He simply has a website. And because he's critical of TechSearch, he's being sued. Use can be an issue, although in most cases it's not.
If TechSearch had such a compelling case, it would have been super easy for them to go after and beat the likes of a Microsoft, AOL or Sun.
If you think about it, it's not much of a stretch at all.
Being in the coin-op market doesn't legitimize your presence in the consumer market. Both of the consumer market leaders aren't in the coin-op market. The nature of competition is different between both markets. Presence in both markets allows you to take advantage of some economies of scale, but that's about it.
From a consumer hardware perspective, Sega is rapidly becoming a non-player. It's been on the decline since the Saturn was released. Dreamcast is a worthy last hurrah, but I think Sega's days are numbered as a consumer gaming hardware provider.
Sega's core business strength isn't in their ability to develop hardware. Even XBox has proven that it can compete on that level using what are basically commodity parts. Sega is a kick-ass software company, and if they develop on multiple platforms, they'll do a bang up job and restore the glory of their past.
After the Saturn fiasco, Sega should have called it quits and gone into software development.
Hardware is hardly profitable, given the competitiveness of the market. The Dreamcast is a great machine (hey, it's hackable and it can run Linux), but it was released by a non-player in the market.
If it weren't for the p*ssing matches between the major players in the industry (it's a major bruise to a company's ego if it gets killed by an industry newcomer, like Sony), Sega would have waken up and smelled the profits in being a pure software company. Sega is responsible some of the greatest arcade games ever created. Think of the money they could make if they sold their wares on N64, Playstation, Playstation 2 and PC. That's a whole lot of cash.
Piracy had nothing to do with it. Public apathy had more to do with it. Sega should take Capcom's approach and write game emulators for each of the platform they want to sell on.
If this story is for real, expect to see Sega in the black within 18 months. This is great news for Sega, not-so-great news for Dreamcast fans.
Acer's newest model in the Travelmate 700 series has biometric scanning with fingerprint access. There's a little pad on the wristrest that allows you to use fingerprints instead of passwords. I don't know the extent of BIOS and HD locking, but it's a great (if not ultra-cool for us geeks) start.
Have you thought about buying a notebook PC with a wireless LAN card? Sure would save a lot of time and effort. And you can put it on any coffee table in the world!
There is definitely something to be said about the use of 16px x 16px and 32px x 32px icons, isn't there?
Sure, they're harder to design, and yes, they're limiting... but the effective use of real estate in a UI is critical.
Eazel looks very promising, but based on the screenshots, it looks like an inefficient use of available screen area.
This sounds like a weird thing, but the thing that can have the greatest negative or positive impact on the appearance of a user interface is the default system screen font.
MacOS and BeOs seem to be the GUIs with the nicest system screen fonts, IMHO. Chicago, the first Mac screen font was designed to be simple, readable and visually appealing.
The old Mac combo of Chicago (or even Charcoal) and Monaco was killer, and gave the Mac GUI a polished and visually clean look.
While I am aware you can probably change the font properties, I'm surprised that these former mac GUI gurus forgot to use a better default screen font.
I always thought the future of the UI would be the snazzy interface everyone in those "next generation" Star Trek series were using. Part conversational, part touch-screen. Easy to mock the movies and television, but a lot of the envisioned user interfaces in movies and shows come from people who don't know how to use computers... which may not be a bad thing.
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Creating cognitive dissonance is an interesting perspective on the Switch advertisments, but I've encountered more Mac users who experienced cognitive dissonance (myself included) than Windoze users.
Granted, the Mac does things well and easily, but it's hard to beat the jealosy of seeing your PC friends being able to buy the latest 3D card or gadget/peripheral whenever they want, inexpensively. While Mac support is much better than it used to be, it will never be up there with Windows.
In fact, I know people who are happier with their Windows PCs after switching from Mac (not just myself either). The main reason is the higher availability of the software and hardware they want to play with. They'll never switch back to Mac. [On a personal note, I'd consider using OSX if it ran on x86 hardware, but I will never buy proprietary Apple hardware ever again.]
I don't know many Windows users who are jealous of Mac owners for anything other than having nice looking systems, much less anyone who loses sleep over it.
Can you prove that Apple's campaign is a success?
There are multiple facets to success in advertising, and ultimately it comes down to Apple's marketing goals (which nobody here is talking about). If the goal is awareness and to win awards, then yes, their campaign is arguably successful.
A lot of advertising is about reducing cognitive dissonance-- i.e., making existing customers feel better about their purchase. I think that's what the Switch campaign is all about -- and they're probably successful here.
But the name of the campaign is "Switch", so perhaps the true acid test should be about conversion of Windows users to Mac users, can it be declared a success? I wonder how much they spend per conversion (formula: total ad dollars divided by total converts attributing switch to the campaign).
Seeing newer, faster x86 hardware with more available software and cheaper expansion options being released monthly for the x86 platform is bound to make a few people jealous. A typical Mac user's response is "Well, Apple's new chip at the end of next year is going to kick your PC's ass!" Duh. As a former Mac user, saying that never made me feel much better about waiting 3 quarters for a faster chip that came in a machine that I couldn't afford to switch to. I upgrade my x86 hardware every year for a fraction of what Mac upgrades used to cost me.
With the progress that the Linux world has made in usability, I just happily "switched" my notebook from Win2K to Red Hat 8. I don't know how much longer OSX users can brag about their switch campaign, because guess what? My switching cost to the Mac platform would cost me $3000 more because I have to buy new hardware. Switching to Red Hat cost me nothing but a few hours of download and installation time.
Don't forget why Graffiti was created. It began as an alternative software package to the flawed handwriting package on the Newton. I remember paying for Graffiti on the original Newton, because I could enter text in twice as fast as with the native recognition.
Of course, Graffiti became Palm, and the rest is history.
To kill two birds with one stone, you should just integrate a Mindstorms robot with a vacuum cleaner and a Flowbee attachment. Then you could use it to cut your hair and lawn.
Hmm. could it be that Steve Jobs put Eisner up to this to boost Mac sales?
Since you can now be a pirate on a Mac, there's no more reason not to buy one!
Now I know what David Wiseman's day job was. Instead of cracking funny jokes while teaching Comp Sci 020 in the evenings at UWO (Introduction to Pascal) in 1989, I always wondered what he did during the daytime. Little did I know he would on a mission to "save" the USENET...
One thing I remember about him was that way back then, his desktop wallpaper on his Sun workstation had a huge picture of his face (noteworthy only because he had what was then considered to be a giant screen monitor - maybe a 17"?) -- that was pretty funny.
The other noteworthy thing I remember about him was that 2% of our exam mark came from putting our name and student number correctly on the exam booklets.
Ah, memories...
If you look at the original post, TechSearch is suing a known patent critic simply because he has a web site. He's not selling a web server or web browser. He simply has a website. And because he's critical of TechSearch, he's being sued. Use can be an issue, although in most cases it's not.
If TechSearch had such a compelling case, it would have been super easy for them to go after and beat the likes of a Microsoft, AOL or Sun.
If you think about it, it's not much of a stretch at all.
Being in the coin-op market doesn't legitimize your presence in the consumer market. Both of the consumer market leaders aren't in the coin-op market. The nature of competition is different between both markets. Presence in both markets allows you to take advantage of some economies of scale, but that's about it.
From a consumer hardware perspective, Sega is rapidly becoming a non-player. It's been on the decline since the Saturn was released. Dreamcast is a worthy last hurrah, but I think Sega's days are numbered as a consumer gaming hardware provider.
Sega's core business strength isn't in their ability to develop hardware. Even XBox has proven that it can compete on that level using what are basically commodity parts. Sega is a kick-ass software company, and if they develop on multiple platforms, they'll do a bang up job and restore the glory of their past.
After the Saturn fiasco, Sega should have called it quits and gone into software development.
Hardware is hardly profitable, given the competitiveness of the market. The Dreamcast is a great machine (hey, it's hackable and it can run Linux), but it was released by a non-player in the market.
If it weren't for the p*ssing matches between the major players in the industry (it's a major bruise to a company's ego if it gets killed by an industry newcomer, like Sony), Sega would have waken up and smelled the profits in being a pure software company. Sega is responsible some of the greatest arcade games ever created. Think of the money they could make if they sold their wares on N64, Playstation, Playstation 2 and PC. That's a whole lot of cash.
Piracy had nothing to do with it. Public apathy had more to do with it. Sega should take Capcom's approach and write game emulators for each of the platform they want to sell on.
If this story is for real, expect to see Sega in the black within 18 months. This is great news for Sega, not-so-great news for Dreamcast fans.
Acer's newest model in the Travelmate 700 series has biometric scanning with fingerprint access. There's a little pad on the wristrest that allows you to use fingerprints instead of passwords. I don't know the extent of BIOS and HD locking, but it's a great (if not ultra-cool for us geeks) start.
Have you thought about buying a notebook PC with a wireless LAN card? Sure would save a lot of time and effort. And you can put it on any coffee table in the world!
Sure, it'll cost a fortune, but at least it doesn't run Windows! : P
There is definitely something to be said about the use of 16px x 16px and 32px x 32px icons, isn't there? Sure, they're harder to design, and yes, they're limiting... but the effective use of real estate in a UI is critical.
Eazel looks very promising, but based on the screenshots, it looks like an inefficient use of available screen area.
This sounds like a weird thing, but the thing that can have the greatest negative or positive impact on the appearance of a user interface is the default system screen font.
MacOS and BeOs seem to be the GUIs with the nicest system screen fonts, IMHO. Chicago, the first Mac screen font was designed to be simple, readable and visually appealing.
The old Mac combo of Chicago (or even Charcoal) and Monaco was killer, and gave the Mac GUI a polished and visually clean look.
While I am aware you can probably change the font properties, I'm surprised that these former mac GUI gurus forgot to use a better default screen font.
I always thought the future of the UI would be the snazzy interface everyone in those "next generation" Star Trek series were using. Part conversational, part touch-screen. Easy to mock the movies and television, but a lot of the envisioned user interfaces in movies and shows come from people who don't know how to use computers... which may not be a bad thing.