Microsoft has launched this crazy big marketing buzz for their latest edition of Windows. It’s all circled around one phrase.
And to follow it up
OK Microsoft, I’ll “show you my Wow”.
Here it is:
A starter for ten. The word Wow, is not a noun. It is not a verb. It’s not even an adjective. In fact, to call it a word is more of a metaphor since it’s not really a word at all. It is, rather, a written representation of a sound one makes when they are surprised and (or) impressed. Or, if you’re in to sarcasm, unimpressed. It might even be an acronym under certain circumstances. But it is not a word.
“Show us your ‘wow’ ” makes about as much sense as saying “There is my yay!”. “Excuse my sir but have you seen my erm?”. “Is that an eh? It’s much better than my huh”.
This is, from what I can see, a perfect example of marketing psychology trumping the English language. A short monosylabic catchphrase, after all, is much easier to remember than “What really impressed you about Vista?”. Or is it? I don’t know. The problem is I don’t think that’s what they’re trying to say. From the marketing hype I have had my brain washed with (yes, I have done training for Field Marketing for Windows Vista) they’re getting at is the idea that the user can actually do what they want to do with their computer. A foriegn concept to many PC users around the world, I’m sure.
The fact is is that a lot of the things that you can do with Vista you could do with XP, albeit with a little more ease. Photo gallery with quick editing options? Sure! Stream media from your media PC upstairs to your home theater box downstairs? Yep! Plug in multiple cameras and manage their contents separately? Certainly! The only difference is that the tools are built into the OS – of course Microsoft probably wouldn’t like people to realise that none of this stuff is really new at all. The only new thing about it is that it’s built into the OS rather than having to rely on third party tools.
It takes choice out of the equation.
Aha, choice. Choice is the bane of any corporate marketing effort. If someone has choice, they might just go for the option that they think will work best for them, rather than your option. If you eliminate choice, then you have a sure sale, right? Well… not exactly. If you eliminate choice you may well sell the product – but you will probably have a lot of dissatisfied customers. And is that customer likely to trust you again in the future? Probably not.
Interestingly, this is what a lot of the Linux community is about. One of the biggest pro-choice entities in the Linux world is Gentoo. Gentoo loves choice so much that you have a choice about every single little detail about your system if you choose their product, right down to the which system logger daemon you want to install. As a result, the user will have a great performing system – providing they’ve taken the time to read the docs and set it up correctly. Which is the one thing that causes issues. The fact you NEED to read the documentation in order to make it work.
Whilst this might not be a problem for someone with enough experience to realise that you should read the documentation, it might not be so obvious to a home user. And if it was, who’s likely to actually do it? How many VCR owners still don’t know how to set the clock? How many VCR owners have stopped caring about the clock, even though without it they’ve reduced the functionality of the machine considerably?
Even if Vista owners did realise that they had a choice about the software that they manage their music with, how many of them would bother to look for better alternatives? Not a lot (considering the target audience). How might one fix this? Hmm…..
You could force users to get their own tools. By that I mean not to include anything with the OS at all. You can, of course, offer your own solutions if you wanted to. What’s stopping Microsoft from publishing Windows Media Player as a separate thing to Windows entirely? And perhaps the Photo Gallery too. What’s stopping them is that they would have to reduce the price of the OS to compensate, and as such lose out on the huge wadge of profit. But considering the amount of sales they will be getting, would this be a problem?
The applications that come with Vista aren’t bad! I must admit, I rather like the Photo gallery. But I wouldn’t want to be stuck with it if I didn’t like it.
Looking at it from a security perspective: every pathologist knows that with a large population of homogeneous organisms, if a pathogen badly affects one of these organisms, it could wipe out the entire population. Similarly with computer viruses, if you have a huge, huge network of workstations all of which are identical, if one of them becomes infected with a worm, chances are that every other machine on the network has the potential to also become infected in exactly the same way.
By default, Windows has a huge attack area. There are LOTS of services running on them, and lots of applications which can be exploited. This is bad enough, but to have this huge bulk of applications on thousands of millions of machines, all of them near as damn it identical – oh dear.
OSes like Linux, although difficult to configure for your average Joe, have the advantage here. Almost every single Linux box on the planet is configured slightly differently. Or at least, the general population of Linux machines are very, very heterogeneous. If someone finds an exploit for, say, apache web server – then the only machines that will be affected are ones running apache. This is a large number of machines, of course, but nothing in comparison to the number of Windows 2000/XP/Vista boxes which run RPC. Which is, by the way, ALL of them.
So there, my friends, is “My ‘Wow’”.
Now where did I put my eak?