Sony is just exercising their Freedom to Innovate(tm). Really! Just remember, whenever a technology company comes out with something new, even if it's actually subtracting value from technology you already have, and even if you don't really want it, it's innovation. And we all know that innovation is good.
Ah, so you're opposed to the presence of states in general? Are you an anarchist, a libertarian, or just someone who believes that any form of collective control is evil? Or are you unopposed to government, so long as it doesn't pass laws (therefore rendering it something other than a government)?
I agree that there are other more imaginative ways to get people to turn off their cellphones in the movie theater. But nobody seems to have come up with one, do they? This isn't the massive cohersive force of the state being brought to bear on poor, defenseless promoters of free thought. It's just people in one municipality saying "enough" and telling cellphone abusers that they need to stop.
...wait for the sword fighting algorithms to start to take shape.
That's exactly why nothing "useful" will come of this. The only people who have any interest whatsoever in immersive 3D worlds are gamers. End of story.
Where are all those corporate giants throwing down the big bucks so they can have virtual conferences? Where are the calls for a new version of VRML from the business community?
As interesting as the technology is, and as cool as Gibson's early stuff was, it's basically a geek toy. It'll wind its way into the collective culture after a while - look at the success of EverSmack and its ilk. 3D visualization tools are already entrenched in many techology-driven business sectors. But will immersive worlds ever become the great tool of commerce that sci-fi has envisioned for over 20 years now?
No. Because in the real world, people matter more than pixels. Commerce is still handled primarily through face-to-face introductions, through lunch meetings and discussions about the baseball strike and the weather and vacations and family and all those other little details that actually make up life.
Sure, the law might not be enforced by cops, but it basically says to cell phone users that the people of this city doesn't sanction the use of cell phones during artistic performances. That's a clear social sanction.
Seems to me this is not legislating morality at all. It's legislating what people can or cannot do in a public place. It has nothing to do with morality, but everything to do with people in large groups being able to get along without wringing each other's necks.
I'm adamantly opposed to DMCA, US Patriot, etc, but comparing those two misguided pieces of legislation to a simple prohibition in one city agains the use of cell phones in theaters is pretty silly.
Government is actually supposed to be representative of the people it serves. See, businesses are profit-making ventures, while governments are created and sustained ostensibly to protect, educate, and sustain the population. While governments conduct businesses, they are not businesses, nor should they be.
Yes, yes, corporate America could run government much better than elected officials. Of course they could. If only the chiefs of AOL, Enron, Philip Morris, and Worldcom were running our local, state, and federal governments, things would be so much more efficient.
I started up a two-person consulting business last year, and so far I have learned a lot. Most of what I learned was that I didn't know as much about business as I thought I did, and that I still have a lot to learn.
But I also learned that the most difficult part of getting a business going and making it self-sustaining is marketing. Word of mouth will be your most powerful marketing tool, as others have suggested. However, in my experience, lead conversion is the most difficult part of building the business. Once someone expresses interest in your services, you have to convince them to actually lay down the cash to have you do the work.
One book I've found very helpful is "Managing the Professional Service Firm" by David Maister. This book really brought home to me the reality that as a technology consultant, you really are in the service business, and as such your marketing efforts have to be an integral part of everything you do.
Another thing I discovered is that getting someone to let you do work for them is not the same as them actually paying you in a timely manner. Developing a billing procedure that lets you provide deliverables in stages, which are tied to invoices, might be something to consider. We've been doing that for the past few months with much better results than the "build it, bill it, wait for weeks and weeks to get paid" process, which really sucks. It may seem like a minor detail, but cashflow can be a real problem when you need to buy a development tool or some service, and suddenly you find that you don't have the cash because your clients have been late in paying you.
Also, treat the business process as you would a technology process. Constantly critique your business efforts and try to learn from your mistakes. As obvious as this sounds, a lot of small business people simply don't conduct any form of self-evaluation or process critiquing.
Don't let the naysayers get you down. It takes a lot of courage to go out and start something on your own. There will always be people sitting smug in their salaried positions, ready to sharpshoot you. But they'll never know what it means to put yourself out there on the edge and go for it.
Finally, for the financial and legal matters associated with starting a business, check out Nolo Press. Their books are very thorough and have been extremely helpful to us in negotiating the often frustrating local, state, and federal paperwork shuffle.
Those RIAA nimwits may be meeting their match here. Not only do they have deep pockets, but think of it this way - when the folks in Washington see this battle, they may rethink what's more important: keeping the Information Superhighway (tm) alive and propelling the New Economy, or keeping the music industry alive in its current bloodsucking incarnation.
Jane: "Darn it, Bob, I just don't understand. No matter how many times we ask people, 'Where do you want to go today?', they still seem to think of us as a big, bullying monopolist."
Bob: "Well, Jane, maybe we should just change the message. Perhaps if we say, 'Where do you really want to go today?', people will respond better!"
The guy in the corner from developer marketing meekly raises his hand. "Uh, guys, perhaps if we didn't put out press releases crowing about our ability to buy out universities, we wouldn't be perceived as bullies."
Jane: "Bob, I think your proposal is right on the money!"
Bob: "Hey, that's why they pay us the big bucks, right?"
You're illustrating the point I'm trying to make. Personality and "human factors" are, for better or worse, more important than any other factor in business. Far from being trivial, they're at the core of everything that happens in a business.
Your minimum effort approach may work, but you may also just be reinforcing existing beliefs about IT people as mercenaries who get along better with machines than with people (not to say that you get along better with machines than with people - I'm talking about perceptions here). Having been in a similar position before, I understand where you're coming from, but there is a difference between being a slave and being helpful.
I saw a presentation by a senior exec from Alien Technology recently, and it was astounding. RFID utilizes incredibly small processor packages that are able to wirelessly communicate with other devices. The real breakthrough is that they can make these devices communicate without manual scanning, and they can manufacture them in volume extremely cheaply.
My guess is once this technology picks up steam, they'll be everywhere, from price tags on the jacket you buy at the Gap, to the pound of ground turkey you snag at Safeway.
Of course, the potential for misbehavior with these things is huge. But it's coming. All of the industry players are on board, the technology is in test production, and before long it'll be deployed.
Guess what, if you'd start to tie managers pay checks to performance of the IT systems the should be responsible for (but never really are being held responsible for), this would change really quick and clean up a lot of bullshitting.
Good point, but I think you should hold the IT managers paychecks to the performance of the systems they're responsible for. Placing the responsibility in the hands of non-IT people is just another way of saying, "we'd rather sit here and be sharpshooters than take responsibility for our work."
Perhaps we'd have fewer wild goose IT projects if IT manager advancement and pay were truly tied to performance. I've yet to see an organization that adequately makes a connection between value delivered and salary of IT managers and staff.
The Air Force example works not because the pilots are held responsible for the readiness of the aircraft, but because the crew chief is.
Here's why: The desire to "innovate" purely for the sake of innovation is something that all geeks innately love. It's not something that everyone else innately loves. In fact, "innovation" often gets in the way of business, because the actual human beings who have to make use of the innovative new systems have enough to pack into their work day already.
IT has a reputation in corporate America as the most unresponsive and least human-centered department in any organization. Here are the stereotypes I've encountered:
1) IT people are more interested in their machines than in helping me do my job.
2) IT people have no understanding of what I do on a daily basis.
3) IT people are penny-wise and pound foolish. They won't pay $200 so I can have a Zip drive that will allow me to take my work home, but they'll spend $1.5M on a VPN that will take a year and a half to implement and won't work properly when finished.
I've been on both sides of the fence, serving as IT support and being one of those people griping at poor IT support. It seems to me that if more IT departments thought of themselves as enablers rather than as an end to themselves, they'd receive much more respect.
Want to see a good example of how it works in a good support organization (and IT is always support)? Go to your nearest Air Force base and talk to the pilots and crew chiefs. Sure, the pilots get all the glory, because missions are oriented around flying the aircraft and hitting the target. But the crew chiefs are given tremendous respect, because they are responsible for making sure the aircraft fly properly. They understand and take pride in their role.
Many IT folks seem to have the opinion that they're smarter than the people they serve. They may be smarter, but that doesn't change the fact that people above them in the organization have to make the truly difficult decisions about hiring and firing, where to spend money, how to stay competitive, and so on. It's not that IT decisions aren't difficult, but in any organization, the more important the decisions you make, the bigger your salary.
If more IT departments realized that they actually are part of a larger team supporting the same goal, and took off their wizard's hats, they might find a lot more acceptance on a human level.
That's where IT folks commonly fall flat on their faces. They don't realize that business people make decisions based almost exclusively on human factors, only secondarily on money, and a distant third on technical factors.
IT departments that grasp the human factors, take care of the other people in the company, and bend over backwards to help people go about their daily tasks are far more likely to get the money they need to conduct glamorous "innovative" projects.
is this issue going to further erode our rights as a consumer?
I obviously am missing something. As a consumer, I now have the ability to purchase either the original version, or a version that has been edited in some fashion.
Doesn't that mean that I now have two choices, rather than one? Isn't that a good thing for consumers?
I'm no fan of the Moral Minority and their ilk, but just because I disagree with their edits doesn't mean that my "consumer rights" have been violated in any fashion.
... a rather pathetic and transparent attempt to stake out a space within which BEA can still matter.
Do you mean to imply that BEA is scared with good reason, or that they're scared for no good reason? I guess what I really want to know is whether you feel BEA is weak, or J2EE is weak, or both?
I'm not sure that BEA is exposing its jugular, but I definitely agree that playing the "we can all get along" game with MS usually leads to catastrophic meltdown. Only a few software companies can truly say that they've been able to successfully partner with MS without being chomped on hard. But using the McNeally approach isn't always successful either.
It seems that one of the most vexing business challenges of this age is "how do we compete in the same market as Microsoft?"
Unless I missed something huge here, the comment: ".NET is finding a sweet spot for programmed user interfaces, while J2EE continues to enjoy its sweet spot for server-side applications" in no way represents BEA giving ground to Microsoft.
BEA makes money by selling WebLogic, which is an environment for developing server-side apps. He seems to really be saying, "Look, Microsoft, you go mess around with programmed user interfaces, because server-side development is our turf."
Openly defying Microsoft doesn't usually work, but clever companies have managed to stay out of Microsoft's sights by promising to play well with Microsoft and stay in their niche.
by not using the rights they have. Americans have rolled over on their fucking backs, kicking their legs like cockroaches, because ( I hear this all the time) registering to vote is a pain in the ass, paying attention to the issues takes too much effort,... etc., etc..
American corporations are strong legal entities only because the American public let them get that way. The beauty of the US Constitution is that whenver Americans truly want to exercise their rights, they can reign in powers that threaten to undermine our freedoms.
It's happened before. Look at the Robber Barrons. Their excesses spawned a raft of trustbusting legislation. Of course, that legislation didn't just create itself. Normal voters rose up and made their voices heard.
Talk of revolution is nifty, and we'd all doubtless love to engage in a Matrix-style rampage against corporatism. But the real solution isn't revolution, it's working within the political system we already have. The problem is, that requires.. shudder!... actual participation in the process. You can't just write a fucking email or hack your Playstation and get results in politics.
Revolt? Not likely, when Americans can't seem to use the power they already have.
I had to laugh at your *ironical* comments about portable music. Definitely, you make some good points. Perhaps my problem is that I simply can't envision what those future uses of small video might be. Of course, that doesn't mean that someone won't come up with a killer application of the technology.
I can see vertical market uses, for folks like real estate agents, salespeople, and so on, but it still seems like a technology in search of a use. My guess is that if a fantastic new use for small screens pops up, it will be entertainment-driven.
Someone must have ideas for a killer application of small screen technology. Comments?
Why, when every trend in television, desktop computers, and movie theaters is towards more immersive, bigger screens, does anyone think that that a palm-sized screen will ever truly work for viewing movies?
Every time I watch a movie on the small screens in airplanes, I feel like I'm staring through a keyhole. It seems to me that in order for a new product to be successful, (in general, discounting the monopoly and marketing advantages some companies enjoy) it has to offer something better by a noticable factor than previous products.
All the efforts to squeeze video onto palmtops, cellphones, and so on seem to be missing the point that the user experience is really crappy on these things.
The genius of the iPod, imo, is that it makes listening to music easier. Downloading, sorting, and selecting the tunes you want to listen to is easier than with competing players. It might not be by a huge factor, but the accumulation of slight advantages here and there results in a superior product.
Shrinking video down to such a small size may seem akin to putting video games on a Gameboy screen, but I think it's different. Movies are not made for such small screens, whereas Gameboy titles are specifically produced for the screen size used for display.
I'm skeptical that this will ever appeal to anything but a limited audience.
Your rant bordered on complete incoherence, but I gather the gist is that these people are actors.
WRONG.
From the Apple Switch Campaign press release, dated 10 June, 2002: "These are not actors--they're real people who have switched from PCs to Macs, telling their story in their own words," said Steve Jobs, Apple's CEO.
"FUD? Is that anything like the Apple switch commercials?"
Hmm.. maybe to you real people talking about their experiences with PCs as opposed to Macs could be considered spreading Fear Uncertainty and Doubt. To me, it's not even close to FUD.
"In years past Apple wasn't running commercials tarrgetting Microsoft."
True. It's kinda hard not to eventually get around to targeting Microsoft, when they have an operating system monopoly, and are therefore your only competitor. It's not exactly like the goliath Apple is getting ready to stomp on lowly Microsoft.;-)
"If you want to think so..."
It's not that I want to think so, it's that the timing and content of Microsoft's announcements seems to be aimed squarely at disrupting Apple's Macworld announcements. Does it seem coincidental to you?
Slashdot Mirror
Stop fair use! Innovate!.
Ah, so you're opposed to the presence of states in general? Are you an anarchist, a libertarian, or just someone who believes that any form of collective control is evil? Or are you unopposed to government, so long as it doesn't pass laws (therefore rendering it something other than a government)?
I agree that there are other more imaginative ways to get people to turn off their cellphones in the movie theater. But nobody seems to have come up with one, do they? This isn't the massive cohersive force of the state being brought to bear on poor, defenseless promoters of free thought. It's just people in one municipality saying "enough" and telling cellphone abusers that they need to stop.
That's exactly why nothing "useful" will come of this. The only people who have any interest whatsoever in immersive 3D worlds are gamers. End of story.
Where are all those corporate giants throwing down the big bucks so they can have virtual conferences? Where are the calls for a new version of VRML from the business community?
As interesting as the technology is, and as cool as Gibson's early stuff was, it's basically a geek toy. It'll wind its way into the collective culture after a while - look at the success of EverSmack and its ilk. 3D visualization tools are already entrenched in many techology-driven business sectors. But will immersive worlds ever become the great tool of commerce that sci-fi has envisioned for over 20 years now?
No. Because in the real world, people matter more than pixels. Commerce is still handled primarily through face-to-face introductions, through lunch meetings and discussions about the baseball strike and the weather and vacations and family and all those other little details that actually make up life.
V
Seems to me this is not legislating morality at all. It's legislating what people can or cannot do in a public place. It has nothing to do with morality, but everything to do with people in large groups being able to get along without wringing each other's necks.
I'm adamantly opposed to DMCA, US Patriot, etc, but comparing those two misguided pieces of legislation to a simple prohibition in one city agains the use of cell phones in theaters is pretty silly.
Yes, yes, corporate America could run government much better than elected officials. Of course they could. If only the chiefs of AOL, Enron, Philip Morris, and Worldcom were running our local, state, and federal governments, things would be so much more efficient.
But I also learned that the most difficult part of getting a business going and making it self-sustaining is marketing. Word of mouth will be your most powerful marketing tool, as others have suggested. However, in my experience, lead conversion is the most difficult part of building the business. Once someone expresses interest in your services, you have to convince them to actually lay down the cash to have you do the work.
One book I've found very helpful is "Managing the Professional Service Firm" by David Maister. This book really brought home to me the reality that as a technology consultant, you really are in the service business, and as such your marketing efforts have to be an integral part of everything you do.
Another thing I discovered is that getting someone to let you do work for them is not the same as them actually paying you in a timely manner. Developing a billing procedure that lets you provide deliverables in stages, which are tied to invoices, might be something to consider. We've been doing that for the past few months with much better results than the "build it, bill it, wait for weeks and weeks to get paid" process, which really sucks. It may seem like a minor detail, but cashflow can be a real problem when you need to buy a development tool or some service, and suddenly you find that you don't have the cash because your clients have been late in paying you.
Also, treat the business process as you would a technology process. Constantly critique your business efforts and try to learn from your mistakes. As obvious as this sounds, a lot of small business people simply don't conduct any form of self-evaluation or process critiquing.
Don't let the naysayers get you down. It takes a lot of courage to go out and start something on your own. There will always be people sitting smug in their salaried positions, ready to sharpshoot you. But they'll never know what it means to put yourself out there on the edge and go for it.
Finally, for the financial and legal matters associated with starting a business, check out Nolo Press. Their books are very thorough and have been extremely helpful to us in negotiating the often frustrating local, state, and federal paperwork shuffle.
Best of luck!
sorry, it's "T-Rex meets Godzimma!"
Those RIAA nimwits may be meeting their match here. Not only do they have deep pockets, but think of it this way - when the folks in Washington see this battle, they may rethink what's more important: keeping the Information Superhighway (tm) alive and propelling the New Economy, or keeping the music industry alive in its current bloodsucking incarnation.
T-Rex, meet Godzilla. :-)
Player: "But, I never actually said I was gonna attack the dragon."
DM: "Uh, no, but you yelled out 'Die scumsucking winged lizard!' and told me you were running towards it with your +5 Holy Avenger drawn."
Player: "Yeah, but how do you know the dragon interpreted that as a hostile act?"
DM: (pushes the under-the-table zapper button, jolting the player with a dose of electricity strong enough to take down a rhino)
Hmm.. wait, am I putting too much of my own history into this little scenario?
Jane: "Darn it, Bob, I just don't understand. No matter how many times we ask people, 'Where do you want to go today?', they still seem to think of us as a big, bullying monopolist."
Bob: "Well, Jane, maybe we should just change the message. Perhaps if we say, 'Where do you really want to go today?', people will respond better!"
The guy in the corner from developer marketing meekly raises his hand. "Uh, guys, perhaps if we didn't put out press releases crowing about our ability to buy out universities, we wouldn't be perceived as bullies."
Jane: "Bob, I think your proposal is right on the money!"
Bob: "Hey, that's why they pay us the big bucks, right?"
You're illustrating the point I'm trying to make. Personality and "human factors" are, for better or worse, more important than any other factor in business. Far from being trivial, they're at the core of everything that happens in a business.
Your minimum effort approach may work, but you may also just be reinforcing existing beliefs about IT people as mercenaries who get along better with machines than with people (not to say that you get along better with machines than with people - I'm talking about perceptions here). Having been in a similar position before, I understand where you're coming from, but there is a difference between being a slave and being helpful.
I saw a presentation by a senior exec from Alien Technology recently, and it was astounding. RFID utilizes incredibly small processor packages that are able to wirelessly communicate with other devices. The real breakthrough is that they can make these devices communicate without manual scanning, and they can manufacture them in volume extremely cheaply.
My guess is once this technology picks up steam, they'll be everywhere, from price tags on the jacket you buy at the Gap, to the pound of ground turkey you snag at Safeway.
Of course, the potential for misbehavior with these things is huge. But it's coming. All of the industry players are on board, the technology is in test production, and before long it'll be deployed.
Good point, but I think you should hold the IT managers paychecks to the performance of the systems they're responsible for. Placing the responsibility in the hands of non-IT people is just another way of saying, "we'd rather sit here and be sharpshooters than take responsibility for our work."
Perhaps we'd have fewer wild goose IT projects if IT manager advancement and pay were truly tied to performance. I've yet to see an organization that adequately makes a connection between value delivered and salary of IT managers and staff.
The Air Force example works not because the pilots are held responsible for the readiness of the aircraft, but because the crew chief is.
IT has a reputation in corporate America as the most unresponsive and least human-centered department in any organization. Here are the stereotypes I've encountered:
1) IT people are more interested in their machines than in helping me do my job.
2) IT people have no understanding of what I do on a daily basis.
3) IT people are penny-wise and pound foolish. They won't pay $200 so I can have a Zip drive that will allow me to take my work home, but they'll spend $1.5M on a VPN that will take a year and a half to implement and won't work properly when finished.
I've been on both sides of the fence, serving as IT support and being one of those people griping at poor IT support. It seems to me that if more IT departments thought of themselves as enablers rather than as an end to themselves, they'd receive much more respect.
Want to see a good example of how it works in a good support organization (and IT is always support)? Go to your nearest Air Force base and talk to the pilots and crew chiefs. Sure, the pilots get all the glory, because missions are oriented around flying the aircraft and hitting the target. But the crew chiefs are given tremendous respect, because they are responsible for making sure the aircraft fly properly. They understand and take pride in their role.
Many IT folks seem to have the opinion that they're smarter than the people they serve. They may be smarter, but that doesn't change the fact that people above them in the organization have to make the truly difficult decisions about hiring and firing, where to spend money, how to stay competitive, and so on. It's not that IT decisions aren't difficult, but in any organization, the more important the decisions you make, the bigger your salary.
If more IT departments realized that they actually are part of a larger team supporting the same goal, and took off their wizard's hats, they might find a lot more acceptance on a human level.
That's where IT folks commonly fall flat on their faces. They don't realize that business people make decisions based almost exclusively on human factors, only secondarily on money, and a distant third on technical factors.
IT departments that grasp the human factors, take care of the other people in the company, and bend over backwards to help people go about their daily tasks are far more likely to get the money they need to conduct glamorous "innovative" projects.
I obviously am missing something. As a consumer, I now have the ability to purchase either the original version, or a version that has been edited in some fashion.
Doesn't that mean that I now have two choices, rather than one? Isn't that a good thing for consumers?
I'm no fan of the Moral Minority and their ilk, but just because I disagree with their edits doesn't mean that my "consumer rights" have been violated in any fashion.
Do you mean to imply that BEA is scared with good reason, or that they're scared for no good reason? I guess what I really want to know is whether you feel BEA is weak, or J2EE is weak, or both?
I'm not sure that BEA is exposing its jugular, but I definitely agree that playing the "we can all get along" game with MS usually leads to catastrophic meltdown. Only a few software companies can truly say that they've been able to successfully partner with MS without being chomped on hard. But using the McNeally approach isn't always successful either.
It seems that one of the most vexing business challenges of this age is "how do we compete in the same market as Microsoft?"
BEA makes money by selling WebLogic, which is an environment for developing server-side apps. He seems to really be saying, "Look, Microsoft, you go mess around with programmed user interfaces, because server-side development is our turf."
Openly defying Microsoft doesn't usually work, but clever companies have managed to stay out of Microsoft's sights by promising to play well with Microsoft and stay in their niche.
American corporations are strong legal entities only because the American public let them get that way. The beauty of the US Constitution is that whenver Americans truly want to exercise their rights, they can reign in powers that threaten to undermine our freedoms.
It's happened before. Look at the Robber Barrons. Their excesses spawned a raft of trustbusting legislation. Of course, that legislation didn't just create itself. Normal voters rose up and made their voices heard.
Talk of revolution is nifty, and we'd all doubtless love to engage in a Matrix-style rampage against corporatism. But the real solution isn't revolution, it's working within the political system we already have. The problem is, that requires.. shudder!... actual participation in the process. You can't just write a fucking email or hack your Playstation and get results in politics.
Revolt? Not likely, when Americans can't seem to use the power they already have.
2) Heh heh.. he still made some money off the deal.
3) Damn! 413 games! Where did you say this guy's shop was?
I can see vertical market uses, for folks like real estate agents, salespeople, and so on, but it still seems like a technology in search of a use. My guess is that if a fantastic new use for small screens pops up, it will be entertainment-driven.
Someone must have ideas for a killer application of small screen technology. Comments?
Every time I watch a movie on the small screens in airplanes, I feel like I'm staring through a keyhole. It seems to me that in order for a new product to be successful, (in general, discounting the monopoly and marketing advantages some companies enjoy) it has to offer something better by a noticable factor than previous products.
All the efforts to squeeze video onto palmtops, cellphones, and so on seem to be missing the point that the user experience is really crappy on these things.
The genius of the iPod, imo, is that it makes listening to music easier. Downloading, sorting, and selecting the tunes you want to listen to is easier than with competing players. It might not be by a huge factor, but the accumulation of slight advantages here and there results in a superior product.
Shrinking video down to such a small size may seem akin to putting video games on a Gameboy screen, but I think it's different. Movies are not made for such small screens, whereas Gameboy titles are specifically produced for the screen size used for display.
I'm skeptical that this will ever appeal to anything but a limited audience.
WRONG.
From the Apple Switch Campaign press release, dated 10 June, 2002: "These are not actors--they're real people who have switched from PCs to Macs, telling their story in their own words," said Steve Jobs, Apple's CEO.
Hmm.. maybe to you real people talking about their experiences with PCs as opposed to Macs could be considered spreading Fear Uncertainty and Doubt. To me, it's not even close to FUD.
"In years past Apple wasn't running commercials tarrgetting Microsoft."
True. It's kinda hard not to eventually get around to targeting Microsoft, when they have an operating system monopoly, and are therefore your only competitor. It's not exactly like the goliath Apple is getting ready to stomp on lowly Microsoft. ;-)
"If you want to think so..."
It's not that I want to think so, it's that the timing and content of Microsoft's announcements seems to be aimed squarely at disrupting Apple's Macworld announcements. Does it seem coincidental to you?