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Five Things Microsoft Shouldn’t Do

G.L. Hoffman offers some marketing advice in the wake of the news that Microsoft has hired Crispin Porter + Bogusky, the agency that revamped Burger King among many other brands.

Certainly those guys have their work cut out for them. Microsoft is much more a part of people’s daily lives than perhaps any other brand that agency has worked on — we may occasionally get a Whopper or pop some of Orville Redenbacher’s popcorn, but a lot of people spend a significant portion of their day staring into one or more Microsoft products. There are relatively few people whose minds aren’t already made up about Microsoft, who don’t have at least one horror story about how Windows or Office briefly made their lives miserable. If that weren’t bad enough, Apple is mocking Microsoft’s signature product in what is probably the most recognizable ad campaign running today. How do you turn a brand around in the face of all that?

Hoffman’s suggestions in brief:

  1. Get Bill Gates involved in the ads.
  2. I’m not actually sure what his second suggestion is; you’d best read it yourself. I think it’s something about innovating from the bottom up, then publicizing it.
  3. Respond to Apple.
  4. Ditch the Microsoft logo.
  5. Bring Gates back to save the company by making “smart” the new “cool.”

Suggestion 1 is obviously wrong. The only way to make Gates appealing would be to poke fun at his dorkishness, and he’s too uptight for that. Gates isn’t a lovable dweeb like John Hodgman’s PC character; he’s stiff and unfunny and rather painful to listen to. Likewise, suggestion 5 draws an incorrect analogy to Jobs’ role at Apple. Jobs returned to a company that lost its way without him; Microsoft is still operating in Gates’ mold: its culture is built around competition, not innovation, and its software products are designed to appeal to developers and IT managers more than end users. And there may be some people who vaguely believe Gates invented personal computing, but it can’t have escaped the public’s attention that the latest technical innovations to catch on with the public — the iPod, MySpace, YouTube, Digg, even that Kindle thing — came from companies other than Microsoft. Continue reading →

Another day, another split decision.

So I see Obama has a majority of pledged delegates. And at the same time, Hillary wins another one, this time in Kentucky.

I am desperate for this crap to be over. I was about to donate to the Obama campaign again — but I realize what I’d really prefer to do is anti-donate to the Hillary campaign. Actually sap money out of her coffers. We can encourage people to run by lending support; why not be able to discourage running by actually sapping support? Now THAT would be democracy.

OK, I realize it’s actually a stupid idea. But really, I am desperate for this crap to be over.

Microhoo redux?

Carl Icahn is obviously smarter than me. So I’m not quite sure why he’s threatening to oust Yahoo’s BOD in an attempt to woo Microsoft back to the table, as outlined in this article.

Microhoo! might sound like a good idea to Yahoo’s shareholders and once seemed like a pretty good idea to Steve Ballmer, but none of the grunt workers (the people responsible for actually creating and selling product) wanted this merger to happen. Icahn would be trading a short-term spike in shareholder value for years of paralysis, brain drain and slow, painful assimilation of two contrary corporate cultures. Meanwhile Google would continue to widen its lead in search, search-based advertising, online services, and whatever the hell else Microsoft is hoping to catch up with them for.

I admit it would be kind of fun to watch if the merger actually did take place. The spectacle of Microsoft slowly suffocating under its own weight has been amusing as it is; adding Yahoo’s ponderous bulk to the mix would elevate it to the level of Shakespearean tragedy.

Albert Hoffman (and child)

I missed this a few days ago: Albert Hoffman, the chemist who invented (or synthesized or discovered) LSD, died a few days ago. The guy lived to 102. Must be something in the water in Switzerland.

It reminded me of this article I read years ago in Slate, about how a 2000 bust by the DEA basically wiped out LSD as a recreational drug. It is evidently very difficult to make — no bargain-basement LSD labs in the small towns of Middle America à la the ones that grace us with crystal meth — and these two fellows in Kansas were the only ones left with the means and the know-how to do it, at least on such a scale. Not to rhapsodize about an illicit chemical that does some seriously hazardous shit to your head, but the idea of LSD disappearing because it’s too difficult to make can’t help but put me in mind of other products of craft and ingenuity rendered obsolete by quicker, cheaper or baser alternatives.

I am old enough to have actually studied penmanship in school, though not old enough to have retained much of it; I can only recall cursive letters with great effort, and my hand balks at shaping them. I don’t know of any grammar-school age child who studies handwriting the way my classmates and I used to; in today’s world, it would be like teaching a child to shoe a horse. Why spend the time learning to write well when no one writes letters and every other document we touch is created electronically?

So LSD, which some genuinely intelligent people once believed might actually change the way people live, is vanishing; researchers rarely study it, and cheaper, easier and more lucrative substitutes have crowded it off the map. I wonder if Dr. Hoffman imagined he would live long enough to witness it, the slow passing of his “problem child.”

In the not-too-distant past

Another recent interview with Joel Hodgson wherein he’s much more candid about his time in MST3K than he was in the past. This may have been well-known to fans more clued in than me, but his leaving midway through season five was entirely due to his feud with Jim Mallon; his claims at the time to have reams of ideas he wanted to try out were smoke to protect the reputation of the show. Does he regret leaving? “Absolutely.”

I really came to enjoy Mike’s tenure as host, but you can’t help but wonder how the show would have progressed had Joel stayed. Maybe he would have stepped aside as host anyway, or alternated with Mike; maybe Trace and Frank wouldn’t have left when they did; maybe Joel would’ve completely revamped the premise and it would have taken on new life, or crashed and burned. Beyond all that, you can’t help but feel a pang for a creative person forced out of their own creation. (John Kricfalusi can relate, I’m sure.) And whatever the hell Mallon is doing with the property nowadays doesn’t inspire much sympathy for his side of the issue. (There is no Tom Servo without Kevin Murphy. Doesn’t matter if Josh did it first. Nobody thinks of the Beatles as John, Paul, George, Stu and Pete do they?)

Obscure related trivia: Joel Hodgson’s original Gizmonic Antsite was the first proper website I ever visited. (Not counting the proprietary stuff from the Prodigy days.) Even that black-and-white number loaded slow as hell on my AOL dialup connection.