As someone who not only took several years of marketing courses, but who also won a national medal at a DECA competition, I can assure that sales is a subset of marketing.
Here is the text without links, which it should let me post:
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Recently Microsoft unveiled their new slogan, "People-ready business". They have asked bloggers to write about what exactly this means to them. As someone who has grown up on Microsoft technologies, not only in the home, but in the workplace as well, I feel that I am very qualified to write about what this means to me.
Not everyone is a computer genius, and ever for those with strong technical skills, information technology is ever changing. It is near impossible to keep up, and thusly it is vital to design technologies that are intuitive to the end user. Time shouldn't be wasted on fighting with the technology. The tools should be designed in a way so that users can easily take advantage of them. They should also feature-rich and powerful so that advanced users can maximize productivity. Microsoft's crown jewel in this regard is likely their Office Suite. Not many people may recall, but at one time Microsoft was the underdog in Word Processing and Office software. It had to wrestle control of the market away from such giants as WordPerfect and dBase IV. Microsoft Office has become the de facto standard for how most people work and communicate.
However, being "People-ready" means the tool isn't as important as the people who use them. Our documents and databases, our emails and calendars, it is the data that we create that is so vital to us. In that regard, there has been growing concern over Microsoft's proprietary document standards. When creating a document in one version of Office, can you be assured that a user with another version of Office can open it? How sure are you that you'll be able to open your data 5 years from now, or 10? How useful is the tool, if we end losing access to everything we create with it? Shouldn't our content belong to us? Being "People-ready" means empowering the people to fully control their documents. In that regard, I recommend everyone to look into alternatives like OpenOffice and KOffice, which both utilize the Open Document Format.
Being "People-ready" also means being flexible and far-reaching. When working and communicating with others in a global environment, having open standards allows for people around the globe to connect together, even across different platforms and technologies. Again, technology should be a tool that allows us to collaborate, not intrinsically divides us. End-users don't care about hardware levels, or version-numbers. They just want to be able to connect with other people. If Microsoft were truly dedicated to being "People-ready" their products would focus more on open-standards. Their web-browser would be standards-compliant, so that people can more easily develop web-sites and know that everyone will be able to see and use them the same way. Microsoft would utilize open-standards for applications like Outlook, so they could handle contacts and appointments with anyone regardless of platform. They would open up their instant messaging network, and instead build on an open platform like Jabber so that we can simply to one address for messaging, and bring everyone together under one service and one protocol for the entire world rather than a collection of diverse networks again that divide us.
A while back Microsoft ran a campaign about believing in the people who use their products. The campaign suggested that Microsoft wanted to encourage us to innovate and be successful, when in truth, no major company has done more to stifle the growth and development of other companies. Honest competition is fine in a capitalistic society, but repeatedly Microsoft has been accused, and often been found guilty of anti-trust practices. They have bought out companies, strong-armed vendors into locking out the competition, breaking the law, and operating with hostile intent to destroy other businesses. "People-ready business" is not threating to "fucking bury that guy, I have done it before, and I will do it again. I'm going to fucking kill Google".
Isn't that the point of this blogging campaign though? If Microsoft is trying to get a variety of positive posts via blogging, then let it backfire. Let's blog on what the slogan means to us.
More and more people seem to invest a huge interest into blogs. They accept it as sincere opinion. We dismiss an ad because it is paid for and biased. When we see blogs that are paid for, we assume the opinions are sincere, when really they are deceptively biased.
I'm not sure the average user will Google for "People-Ready Business" but I'm sure Microsoft is, to see how quickly it is skyrocketing in PageRank.
I would absolutely love for the Microsoft PR firms and execs to Google for "People-Ready Business" and instead be inundated with our sincere opinions with how Microsoft fails to actually cater to the people who are forced to use their products.
This is what I challenge everyone. Let's make some copy (text) about what 'people-ready business' means to us, and by that I mean slam Microsoft rightfully so for putting small companies out of business, etc.
Then post an exact copy of that text on every blog, forum and community we can find. Link to it everywhere. Have that be the #1 hit in every search engine. When people search for Microsoft and "People-Ready Business" let them find exactly Microsoft represents.
If the intent was to get PageRank up, and get word of mouth out, then getting an article on Slashdot did work.
Now I've heard the slogan, and no doubt this will increase hits to their site, people linking to them, PageRank, etc.
However I completely disagree that their marketing is horrible.
Marketing is arguably more important than making a quality product. Marketing isn't just the ads you see on TV. It the deals you strike with vendors and the like, and whether ethical or not, their marketing has been EXTREMELY successful.
So Rockstar makes more money by not releasing the game?
The only way Rockstar can make money off the game now is doing a PC port. And given that most major retailers like WalMart and BestBuy refuse to carry AO titles, they'd be forced to release it via digital distribution.
Thusly the only way they can make any money is to follow what I suggested.
Re:Vista Transformation Pack
on
Pimp Your XP
·
· Score: 1
I've been running on any a variety of boxes (both XP Home and Pro) since VTP 4 and never once encountered a graphical glitch, and this is with a variety of graphics cards and drivers.
And I ran Vista for two days and it brought my wife's laptop to an absolute crawl, and that is an Athlon Turion 64 with a 1 gig of memory and separate dedicated GPU memory.
XP is very fast and snappy on her box. I refuse to believe that Vista runs as fast as XP with there is plenty of pure, empirical quantifiable evidence via benchmarks that it runs considerably slower, even without Aero, and uses considerably more resources to boot.
Vista Transformation Pack
on
Pimp Your XP
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
The VTP makes XP look like Vista, doesn't slow down your computer, and is free. It includes several freeware apps such as a Sidebar, a Start Orb, etc. It is really polished the new version is supposed to be released Monday.
And with KDE being ported to Windows with KDE 4, you'll also be able to get both Konqueror and Dolphin on XP if you want to try another file manager without shelling out $70.
Personally, Sony has the right to decide what is on the hardware, as does Nintendo and Microsoft.
The ratings board just rates games.
Honestly, I have nothing wrong with this whole scenario.
I say Rockstar should release the game on the PC and sell it on the cheap, say $35-$40. Let people download it through Steam since most major retailers probably won't carry it.
Between people buying it through online retailers, and Steam, if the game still manages to sell, it will be an object lesson to those who won't carry AO titles.
More adults game than children. As a parent, I want to keep content like this from my kid's hands.
If you read my posts, you'd see that I said several times over again that both the President and Congress have repeatedly failed to uphold the Constitution, but in theory the Constitution still overrides them. It should be noted that a bipartisan Congress repeatedly has upheld the wiretaps. Yet you seem to insist this is the action of the President alone. Any real judge worth their salt should uphold Constitutional rights even when Congress isn't.
My argument was that we were no where in the league of China.
If you can someone tell me how eavesdropping is on the same level as transmigration, then you can continue with your hostile tone.
I just started an e-commerce site for a friend, and the first thing I did when I was mostly done with the code was run it through the xhtml and css validators.
We only have one box in the house that is pure Windows. My wife didn't have the patience to compile software, so she gave up on Gentoo and went back to Windows x64.
However, she has decided once again she hates Windows. We're backing up everything off her laptop (which includes a lot of large video files) and installing Kubuntu this weekend.
Not that I have some free time with the new job, I'm probably going to make a new toolchain overlay again. I'm going to pull the patches for binutils, glibc and gcc from each major distro, and combine the best from each with the latest versions of said programs.
As a child I wasn't paranoid of such things. I thought only crooks would really have something to hide, and it would make life more difficult for criminals.
I basically operate solely on electronic funds. Every bill I have each month is paid electronically, and I receive my money electronically. All other purchases are made with my credit card, usually over a computer.
I've never had an issue with theft of electronic funds, and if I did, I'd be reimbursed the funds.
When someone steals my cash, I am not reimbursed anything.
Not only is Dolphin already in KDE 4.0, it is the default filemanager.
Perhaps you need to do some reading over at kde.org where people have gone back and forth over this issue repeatedly.
Has Dolphin replicated all the features of Konq yet? Nope. But they are working on most of the features.
Konquerer is designed to be everything, which is bad at times. For instance, the bookmarking system was designed for the web in mind. Dolphin has a very different bookmarking system designed with being a file manager.
I haven't carried cash in years. Even small purchases like fast-food I use plastic.
I can transfer funds with my free online banking within seconds, and you don't even have to bother depositing a check.
With services like PayPal I can even make small microtransactions with ease.
My wife sells sex toys for PureRomance. When she does parties, she doesn't have a swipe or a computer handy. She literally makes a rubbing of the card, and enters the transaction later.
We don't touch cash, and literally the only time we ever need to is to pay a parking meter.
What about the studies that have demonstrated that the new interface actually cuts down on productivity?
I don't want to sound like a fanboi here, but I'm more excited about the emerging technologies in KDE4.
Windows XP was actually a pretty decent OS. I found on the same hardware it could be configured to run better than Win 2k, it was relatively stable, easy to use, etc.
My biggest beef with XP was how poorly it was configured out of the box.
Given the poor usability issues, poor performance, lack of drivers, application breakage etc, the financial cost, I just can't see a single compelling reason to get Vista.
I used a beta for less than two days and was really put off.
Because KHTML is the most standards compliant rendering engine that I know of.
My suggestion is that you design for standards compliance, see how it looks in a standards compliant rendering engine and move forward.
That makes me an enemy of standards?
How so?
Quite frankly, if Safari, Konqueror and Firefox combined their market share with one rendering engine, more and more webmasters would be encouraged to design around standards as opposed to designing to meet IE simply because it has the majority of the market share. A large group collaberation on one polished, web-standards compliant rendering engine might be just want it takes to bump IE out of the top spot.
But then again, I'm an enemy of standards apparently. I guess I should stop validating all my sites. You've convinced me.
My personal opinion is that much of stems from our media. Partisan politics is big here, so our media is filled with politicians attacking politicians. Everyday we hear how our government is evil, and all of our leaders are jerks. Eventually it just sinks in, and the populace seems to think we have this truly horrid nation.
Yep. If I recall, the oath they had me read was pretty much the same one the President swears by.
"I do solemnly swear that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic, that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same: that I take this obligation freely, without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion, and I will well and faithfully discharge the duties of the office on which I am about to enter. So help me God."
Slashdot Mirror
As someone who not only took several years of marketing courses, but who also won a national medal at a DECA competition, I can assure that sales is a subset of marketing.
Here is the text without links, which it should let me post:
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Recently Microsoft unveiled their new slogan, "People-ready business". They have asked bloggers to write about what exactly this means to them. As someone who has grown up on Microsoft technologies, not only in the home, but in the workplace as well, I feel that I am very qualified to write about what this means to me.
Not everyone is a computer genius, and ever for those with strong technical skills, information technology is ever changing. It is near impossible to keep up, and thusly it is vital to design technologies that are intuitive to the end user. Time shouldn't be wasted on fighting with the technology. The tools should be designed in a way so that users can easily take advantage of them. They should also feature-rich and powerful so that advanced users can maximize productivity. Microsoft's crown jewel in this regard is likely their Office Suite. Not many people may recall, but at one time Microsoft was the underdog in Word Processing and Office software. It had to wrestle control of the market away from such giants as WordPerfect and dBase IV. Microsoft Office has become the de facto standard for how most people work and communicate.
However, being "People-ready" means the tool isn't as important as the people who use them. Our documents and databases, our emails and calendars, it is the data that we create that is so vital to us. In that regard, there has been growing concern over Microsoft's proprietary document standards. When creating a document in one version of Office, can you be assured that a user with another version of Office can open it? How sure are you that you'll be able to open your data 5 years from now, or 10? How useful is the tool, if we end losing access to everything we create with it? Shouldn't our content belong to us? Being "People-ready" means empowering the people to fully control their documents. In that regard, I recommend everyone to look into alternatives like OpenOffice and KOffice, which both utilize the Open Document Format.
Being "People-ready" also means being flexible and far-reaching. When working and communicating with others in a global environment, having open standards allows for people around the globe to connect together, even across different platforms and technologies. Again, technology should be a tool that allows us to collaborate, not intrinsically divides us. End-users don't care about hardware levels, or version-numbers. They just want to be able to connect with other people. If Microsoft were truly dedicated to being "People-ready" their products would focus more on open-standards. Their web-browser would be standards-compliant, so that people can more easily develop web-sites and know that everyone will be able to see and use them the same way. Microsoft would utilize open-standards for applications like Outlook, so they could handle contacts and appointments with anyone regardless of platform. They would open up their instant messaging network, and instead build on an open platform like Jabber so that we can simply to one address for messaging, and bring everyone together under one service and one protocol for the entire world rather than a collection of diverse networks again that divide us.
A while back Microsoft ran a campaign about believing in the people who use their products. The campaign suggested that Microsoft wanted to encourage us to innovate and be successful, when in truth, no major company has done more to stifle the growth and development of other companies. Honest competition is fine in a capitalistic society, but repeatedly Microsoft has been accused, and often been found guilty of anti-trust practices. They have bought out companies, strong-armed vendors into locking out the competition, breaking the law, and operating with hostile intent to destroy other businesses. "People-ready business" is not threating to "fucking bury that guy, I have done it before, and I will do it again. I'm going to fucking kill Google".
I put in a bunch of URLs in the text I threw together, so Slashdot won't let me post here. Too many junk characters.
So I made a journal entry.
http://slashdot.org/~Enderandrew/journal/175391
Isn't that the point of this blogging campaign though? If Microsoft is trying to get a variety of positive posts via blogging, then let it backfire. Let's blog on what the slogan means to us.
More and more people seem to invest a huge interest into blogs. They accept it as sincere opinion. We dismiss an ad because it is paid for and biased. When we see blogs that are paid for, we assume the opinions are sincere, when really they are deceptively biased.
I'm not sure the average user will Google for "People-Ready Business" but I'm sure Microsoft is, to see how quickly it is skyrocketing in PageRank.
I would absolutely love for the Microsoft PR firms and execs to Google for "People-Ready Business" and instead be inundated with our sincere opinions with how Microsoft fails to actually cater to the people who are forced to use their products.
This is what I challenge everyone. Let's make some copy (text) about what 'people-ready business' means to us, and by that I mean slam Microsoft rightfully so for putting small companies out of business, etc.
Then post an exact copy of that text on every blog, forum and community we can find. Link to it everywhere. Have that be the #1 hit in every search engine. When people search for Microsoft and "People-Ready Business" let them find exactly Microsoft represents.
If the intent was to get PageRank up, and get word of mouth out, then getting an article on Slashdot did work.
Now I've heard the slogan, and no doubt this will increase hits to their site, people linking to them, PageRank, etc.
However I completely disagree that their marketing is horrible.
Marketing is arguably more important than making a quality product. Marketing isn't just the ads you see on TV. It the deals you strike with vendors and the like, and whether ethical or not, their marketing has been EXTREMELY successful.
Intel was just waxing nostalgic and wanted to remember the good only days.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pentium_FDIV_bug
That takes me back.
"If Windows were an ice cream, it would be hoggin' dos!"
I miss my BBS'in days.
Sega inked a deal over a year ago for Obsidian to do an RPG for them, and I wasn't sure what the IP was.
I wonder whatever happened to that?
So Rockstar makes more money by not releasing the game?
The only way Rockstar can make money off the game now is doing a PC port. And given that most major retailers like WalMart and BestBuy refuse to carry AO titles, they'd be forced to release it via digital distribution.
Thusly the only way they can make any money is to follow what I suggested.
I've been running on any a variety of boxes (both XP Home and Pro) since VTP 4 and never once encountered a graphical glitch, and this is with a variety of graphics cards and drivers.
And I ran Vista for two days and it brought my wife's laptop to an absolute crawl, and that is an Athlon Turion 64 with a 1 gig of memory and separate dedicated GPU memory.
XP is very fast and snappy on her box. I refuse to believe that Vista runs as fast as XP with there is plenty of pure, empirical quantifiable evidence via benchmarks that it runs considerably slower, even without Aero, and uses considerably more resources to boot.
Not a mention of the Vista Transformation Pack in the article?
The VTP makes XP look like Vista, doesn't slow down your computer, and is free. It includes several freeware apps such as a Sidebar, a Start Orb, etc. It is really polished the new version is supposed to be released Monday.
You can also get Vista games on XP.
And with KDE being ported to Windows with KDE 4, you'll also be able to get both Konqueror and Dolphin on XP if you want to try another file manager without shelling out $70.
Personally, Sony has the right to decide what is on the hardware, as does Nintendo and Microsoft.
The ratings board just rates games.
Honestly, I have nothing wrong with this whole scenario.
I say Rockstar should release the game on the PC and sell it on the cheap, say $35-$40. Let people download it through Steam since most major retailers probably won't carry it.
Between people buying it through online retailers, and Steam, if the game still manages to sell, it will be an object lesson to those who won't carry AO titles.
More adults game than children. As a parent, I want to keep content like this from my kid's hands.
But I'd like the opportunity to play it myself.
Who said I was making excuses for the President?
If you read my posts, you'd see that I said several times over again that both the President and Congress have repeatedly failed to uphold the Constitution, but in theory the Constitution still overrides them. It should be noted that a bipartisan Congress repeatedly has upheld the wiretaps. Yet you seem to insist this is the action of the President alone. Any real judge worth their salt should uphold Constitutional rights even when Congress isn't.
My argument was that we were no where in the league of China.
If you can someone tell me how eavesdropping is on the same level as transmigration, then you can continue with your hostile tone.
No, you assume that I don't double check my work.
I just started an e-commerce site for a friend, and the first thing I did when I was mostly done with the code was run it through the xhtml and css validators.
I'm far from a genius webmaster.
We only have one box in the house that is pure Windows. My wife didn't have the patience to compile software, so she gave up on Gentoo and went back to Windows x64.
However, she has decided once again she hates Windows. We're backing up everything off her laptop (which includes a lot of large video files) and installing Kubuntu this weekend.
Not that I have some free time with the new job, I'm probably going to make a new toolchain overlay again. I'm going to pull the patches for binutils, glibc and gcc from each major distro, and combine the best from each with the latest versions of said programs.
As a child I wasn't paranoid of such things. I thought only crooks would really have something to hide, and it would make life more difficult for criminals.
I basically operate solely on electronic funds. Every bill I have each month is paid electronically, and I receive my money electronically. All other purchases are made with my credit card, usually over a computer.
I've never had an issue with theft of electronic funds, and if I did, I'd be reimbursed the funds.
When someone steals my cash, I am not reimbursed anything.
Perhaps you should check your facts.
Not only is Dolphin already in KDE 4.0, it is the default filemanager.
Perhaps you need to do some reading over at kde.org where people have gone back and forth over this issue repeatedly.
Has Dolphin replicated all the features of Konq yet? Nope. But they are working on most of the features.
Konquerer is designed to be everything, which is bad at times. For instance, the bookmarking system was designed for the web in mind. Dolphin has a very different bookmarking system designed with being a file manager.
I never said he should have his freedom of speak revoked.
Just because we are free to say anything, that doesn't mean that everything we can said should be said.
Certain things are dishonest, or offensive.
We are blasted daily with political hyperbole, and I've had it with people repeating such nonsense.
I haven't carried cash in years. Even small purchases like fast-food I use plastic.
I can transfer funds with my free online banking within seconds, and you don't even have to bother depositing a check.
With services like PayPal I can even make small microtransactions with ease.
My wife sells sex toys for PureRomance. When she does parties, she doesn't have a swipe or a computer handy. She literally makes a rubbing of the card, and enters the transaction later.
We don't touch cash, and literally the only time we ever need to is to pay a parking meter.
What about the studies that have demonstrated that the new interface actually cuts down on productivity?
I don't want to sound like a fanboi here, but I'm more excited about the emerging technologies in KDE4.
Windows XP was actually a pretty decent OS. I found on the same hardware it could be configured to run better than Win 2k, it was relatively stable, easy to use, etc.
My biggest beef with XP was how poorly it was configured out of the box.
Given the poor usability issues, poor performance, lack of drivers, application breakage etc, the financial cost, I just can't see a single compelling reason to get Vista.
I used a beta for less than two days and was really put off.
I'll stick to my XP/Gentoo dual-boot, thanks.
Really?
Because KHTML is the most standards compliant rendering engine that I know of.
My suggestion is that you design for standards compliance, see how it looks in a standards compliant rendering engine and move forward.
That makes me an enemy of standards?
How so?
Quite frankly, if Safari, Konqueror and Firefox combined their market share with one rendering engine, more and more webmasters would be encouraged to design around standards as opposed to designing to meet IE simply because it has the majority of the market share. A large group collaberation on one polished, web-standards compliant rendering engine might be just want it takes to bump IE out of the top spot.
But then again, I'm an enemy of standards apparently. I guess I should stop validating all my sites. You've convinced me.
My personal opinion is that much of stems from our media. Partisan politics is big here, so our media is filled with politicians attacking politicians. Everyday we hear how our government is evil, and all of our leaders are jerks. Eventually it just sinks in, and the populace seems to think we have this truly horrid nation.
I just learned of Jose Padilla earlier tonight in this very thread.
Yep. If I recall, the oath they had me read was pretty much the same one the President swears by.
"I do solemnly swear that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic, that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same: that I take this obligation freely, without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion, and I will well and faithfully discharge the duties of the office on which I am about to enter. So help me God."