100 products: what you paid for on the left vs. what you got on the right. See the English write-up at Fantasticus, or go to Pundo3000, the original German site.

Tags: Food, Reality, Pigs With Lipstick

I know it's hard to believe, but just before Leopard was released Microsoft launched a customer care initiative. Yes, on their Breaking Entrepreneurial News page, Inc.com had this item:

Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT) has introduced a new customer service initiative that provides Microsoft Dynamics clients and partners worldwide with industry-leading visibility and control over their ERP and CRM solutions. Business Ready Customer Care offers reassuring insight into upcoming product innovations and extended product support.

Microsoft will provide ongoing road-map visibility through comprehensive statements of direction that announce planned product innovations 12 -18 months before the next version release for Microsoft Dynamics AX, CRM, GP, NAV, SL and Retail Management Solution product lines.

Microsoft will also extend its Support Lifecycle policy for the CRM, ERP and Retail Management Solution product lines, allowing Dynamics customers to receive ten years of product support rather than the normal five years offered.

I love this stuff. Industry-leading visibility and control. Reassuring insight. Ongoing road-map visibility. Comprehensive statements of direction. All terrifically Business Ready.

Tags: Microsoft, Pigs With Lipstick, Buzzwords, Twaddle

From the press release:

The relationship, announced in conjunction with Microsoft's launch of the new Microsoft Dynamics AX Mobile Sales solution and Microsoft Dynamics Mobile Development Tools, paves the way for Motorola PartnerSelect members globally to port their existing enterprise mobility solutions to the Microsoft Dynamics platform. From direct store delivery applications for manufacturers to point of care solutions in the healthcare sector, Microsoft Dynamics AX customers can now empower their mobile workers with innovative Motorola enterprise mobility solutions that can improve productivity and decision-making at the point of activity.

Goodness, what appalling drivel. Certainly not staggeringly good news as can be seen by the stock prices after it was released at midday:

It continues with a quote from a person that nobody has heard of:

Anthony Julien, CEO of Spectra Interface, already both a Microsoft Dynamics and Motorola ISV partner, said, "By leveraging the tools and applications from Microsoft Dynamics Mobile and Motorola partners, we are now able to provide complete solutions to Microsoft Dynamics customers at a much faster rate than we could have done previously and has helped us to extend our geographic reach."

That's some wacky grammar. Dilbert's Mission Statement Generator ("Our goal is to collaboratively coordinate market-driven technology and assertively utilize unique content") is just as meaningless and gets the English correct.

There is no real information in the entire release. Even the explanation needs an explanation:

Microsoft Dynamics is a line of financial, customer relationship and supply chain management solutions that helps businesses work more effectively. Delivered through a network of channel partners providing specialized services, these integrated, adaptable business management solutions work like and with familiar Microsoft software to streamline processes across an entire business.

But don't all supply chain management solutions work this way and provide the same benefit? What is unique about it? What is compelling about it?

Tags: Pigs With Lipstick, Drivel

With a competitor like WII, it's no big surprise that Microsoft is talking about changing its game. Those numbers from VGChartz represent cumulative sales, so the gradients are the rate of sale. Urlocker has more background and more links that show this was all predicted years ahead.

In less than two months there will be more Wii consoles than XBox360 consoles. If you go to the site and play with the graph controls you can see that things look dismal for Sony and Microsoft in Japan. Wii is outselling PS3 five to one.

Tags: Video Games, Pigs With Lipstick, Microsoft

Microsoft announced their first sand table for grown-ups yesterday. The web site is all Flash, so that's an immediate black mark against it (I first thought it was called "buffering").

There have been several demos of this kind of technology on the web in the past few years. That it has taken six years to get from the technology demos that I have seen to this current technology demo is amazing. The original iPod was done in six months and the iPhone in two and a half years. Six years is two technology generations at least.

The real deal-killer is its fundamental ergonomic problem: you can't get your legs underneath it. The original product idea (see the pencil drawing in Origins on the web site) was just like a sand table -- deeper than a table but not uncomfortably so. But this one is a bath tub with a screen on top, so users either suffer from gorilla arm or dinosaur back. The people who are using it in the PR are grinning relentlessly to cover up the pain from their sore arms and aching backs.

A tabletop is actually a pretty bad environment for sharing and collaboration. It has no defined orientation. This means that you have competition among participants who try to out do each other in defining "up". The winner ends up with a haggle of people on their side and the losers are left to mentally rotate everything they see from their respective geometric wastelands. Even without the orientation problem, each participant also gets a different perspective and the table space becomes a hoarding area close to the dominant people. There is a reason we use whiteboards and computer screens in a vertical orientation: they are naturally placed, allow large audiences to share and view information comfortably, and don't suffer from the same degree of competition.

I suppose that the reason for the bath tub design is that there is a camera underneath (and possibly lighting and projection too) that is used to track the movements and recognize objects. The better approach is to build the light sensors into the screen as Apple has patented. The large depth quite substantially limits the places that the device could be used if it were wall-mounted. It simply has to be built in to a structure or mounted on its side like a huge CRT TV. Another challenge for any stand-alone device like this is getting power and data in and out. There will either have to be built-in power, or somebody gets the side with the wires. Venting the heat means that if the top is cool, someone gets warm air blowing at their legs. At least wireless links will rid it of the problem of networking.

Like the Segway, it's cool technology and well-implemented for some very limited applications. But also like the Segway and despite the maker's ideas, it won't change the way almost anyone does anything.

Tags: Microsoft, Segway, Coffee Tables, Pigs With Lipstick, Multitouch, Gorilla Arms, Dinosaur Back

The Register, the epitome of acerbic British commenting, looks at Vista in an article titled Vista First Look: Bugs and Confusion. I'm just glad that my employer (a large US corporation) has told us that they won't be rolling out Vista for at least another 18 months.

Tags: Microsoft, Pigs With Lipstick

It's amazing how badly and in how many ways Microsoft is able to send disastrously damaging messages to its users these days.

Roger Ehrenberg writes for Seeking Alpha, describing in detail the thud of envy that has accompanied Microsoft's recent marketing and product efforts. And then there is whatswrongwithu.com that blames the citizens of most of the developed Asian world for Microsoft's failure to successfully market the XBox360 in that region. Alpha geeks are having a bad time with Vista as well. If you can't impress them, then where are the early adopters going to turn for advice?

Tags: Pigs With Lipstick, Microsoft

Salon has an article by Andrew Leonard that explains Dell's failure in China (oh yes, they bombed there).

As Simon Ye and Annie Chung at Gartner Research called it four days later, Dell -- the low cost leader in most of the world -- was run out of the market by companies willing and able to produce computers at a much lower price.

There can only be one lowest-cost provider. And if that is your whole company's market advantage, then you better not be beaten on price. Next, the Chinese will duplicate the rest of Dell's business in the rest of the world and eventually most of the computer industry will go the way of the car industry.

If I were Apple I'd be licensing Mac OS X -- but only to the Chinese.

Tags: Dell, China, Pigs With Lipstick

Owen Thomas writing for Business 2.0 hits several nails on the head in an article about Dell's business performance these past few years:

Dell needs to figure out a new selling proposition, since its price advantage has disappeared and its customer-service message lacks credibility. That's why Michael Dell's new job is so tough. It's not clear why anyone would buy a Dell today.

The other factor in the equation is that Dell only controls half of their product. Microsoft controls the other half, arguably the most important half. So they can't control most of the product, and the rest is made from commodity parts. It's no wonder that the biggest player is feeling the biggest pain.

Tags: Dell, Pigs With Lipstick, Microsoft

The Joy Of Tech demonstrates the tyranny of choice on their comics page.

Tags: Fun, Microsoft, Pigs With Lipstick

Kotaku has an article that describes the decline of the grey market for Playstation 3 game consoles. Once considered a smash hit product with insatiable customers, reality has set in. The demand is not there and prices have fallen as a result. There is an entire business segment that makes its living from buying game consoles at retail in anticipation of money-no-object buyers who crave the latest gadget. But not this time: it became obvious very quickly that the PS3 is not going to live up to its hype and the potential buyers vanished.

I predict that the next big money maker in this segment is going to be not the consoles themselves, but futures and option contracts for the consoles. Then things can go the way of tulip bulbs in the 17th century.

Tags: Pigs With Lipstick, Consoles

Junko Yoshida, writing for EETimes is an interesting test case for HDTV. She is far from an average buyer:

I've been talking and writing about high-definition TV since I first saw Japan's HDTV demonstration--not in digital, but in analog--more than 20 years ago. My colleagues and I have chronicled for this newspaper all the trials and turbulence behind the development of U.S. digital HDTV technologies, including the advent of an underlying video compression technology that enabled the transmission of digital TV signals, the byzantine politics of TV spectrum and 1,080-interlaced vs. 720-progressive-scan resolution formats that pitted consumer electronics manufacturers against the PC industry. In short, I know this stuff inside out. Or so I thought.

Yet having bought all the equipment and hooked it up, it doesn't work correctly and nobody can fix it:

I ended up calling our retailer (Best Buy), which diverted me to the display manufacturer (Sharp), which called up a subdivision at a different location in order to find a repair guy in our neighborhood--where a high-tech glitch slowed things down. The repair shop's fax machine was broken. So I had to call the repair guy myself, and got to tell the whole story all over again. They said nobody could come until after Christmas.

Apple could have a huge hit in this space simply by making a system that works when you put it together.

[Update: I have added a lot of material in the comments in response to a reader]

Tags: HDTV, Pigs With Lipstick, Interesting Stuff

This could be a fine example of a pig and a stick of lipstick. Ars Technica has reported that 100 pink Zunes have been secretly inserted into the distribution system, so that a small number of lucky purchasers will experience that feeling of being lucky and special, to have received a rare thing among the multitudes of ordinary ones.

But of course putting pink lipstick on this pig will not have that effect. Unlike the golden tickets created by Willy Wonka, these special wrappers carry no prize. And whereas prize-giving wrappers on candy do sell more candy (or why else would they still be doing it?) because ordinary people can expand their candy budget easily, the same ploy is not going to work with high-cost MP3 players. Worse, this is going to have the reverse effect, with a hundred people returning their pink players because they got the wrong one. The value of the pink player to them will be less than a regular brown player.

I actually saw a Zune the other day in a store. I had to wait in line for ten minutes to get a chance to play with it! Just kidding. It was being completely ignored. It was at the end of an aisle, clamped in place on a stand so it was impossible to do anything with it except stab at the buttons and see the display. The clamp meant that not only could I not steal it, I also could not rotate it to read the display. Yes, the Zune, or at least this Zune at this moment, was displaying everything landscape fashion on a device mounted portrait fashion and so I had to twist my head around to read the display. Click click, oh another MP3 player. Impossible to hold it or see how it feels because of the clamp. At the stand there were none available to buy. So if I had decided that I wanted to be welcome to the social, I would have had to go looking for the thing.

At Costco the opposite problem existed. There were piles of empty packages for Zunes and iPods, the idea being that you grab a package, take it to the checkout and they give you a real product to take home. So I could buy one easily, but not evaluate it at all, even by risking a crick in my neck. This kind of packaging works for thee iPod because everyone knows what it is and can easily evaluate it elsewhere. Costco is for bargain-hunters who know what they want and are looking for the lowest price. But for the Zune, it's hopeless. While I was there I saw one person looking at the display. He was carefully reading everything printed on the packaging: clearly he did not have enough information to make a purchasing decision and the result was inevitable.

Tags: Microsoft, Pigs With Lipstick

It's hard to ignore the Zune because there is so much noise about it right now. That's not the happy ka-ching of cash registers though, it's the sound of reviewers ripping it to shreds. Even the enthusiastic ones are realizing what an incredible piece of brand destruction Microsoft has pulled off. Here is a representative article from Playfuls where the reviewer started with a positive attitude and met with an opinion-changing and bewildering parade of stupidities: The Stupid, Idiotic and Annoying Things about the Zune-brick.

And don't buy the "this is our first attempt" excuse: they've had Plays For Sure and their own music store fiascos before this one. What's going on? The product has clearly been rushed to market. The software won't run on Vista (yes really!), the installer marketing looks amateurish, the messages are confusing and dated; the list goes on and on. I see a company out of touch with its users and with itself, flailing around, so unable to get traction that it is basically unable to make meaningful product releases any more. Either those tens of thousands of new hires they have been adding are working on a super-secret new operating system project that will reinvent the company, or they are turning the corner into a slow death spiral, much the same way as SGI did.

Tags: Microsoft, Pigs With Lipstick

Engadget tries to install the software that comes with the Zune and has some difficulty. It took 20 minutes, several crashes, restarts, and tons of registration, including the need to create a "tag":

While we were figuring out which tag to use, we were suggested some pretty awesome(ly awful) names:
• TwinightRyan (sp)
• UprightRyan
• GrizzlyRyan
• PraisedCloud
• ScapularWorm and
• HangingCheetah
• PricyRacketeer
• GutlessStudent
• WontedSum
• PeeweeDust
Do we LOOK like a scapular worm to you? Don't answer that.

Make sure you read the comments as well.

Tags: Microsoft, Pigs With Lipstick

Microsoft Codename Max is dead. Whatever it was it is no more. It took me some Googling to find out:

With just a few clicks, you can create lists of your favorite photos, arrange them in the layout of your choice, and express them in beautiful views. Preview your photo lists as you build them until your presentation is perfect. You can even use our super hot 3D Mantle View to really show off your work!

A competitor to Aperture? But they have iView. A slide show application? But there are dozens of these, free, open source, Java, Flash, everything.

Maybe it was hard to find out anything because this product is not a product:

Microsoft® Codename Max is not like any other product. That's because it's not a product—it's your opportunity to try an exciting new user experience from Microsoft. Today Max lets you make lists of your photos and turn them into beautiful slide shows to share with your family and friends. Tomorrow...who knows?

With just a few clicks, you can create lists of your favorite photos, arrange them in the layout of your choice, and express them in beautiful views. Preview your photo lists as you build them until your presentation is perfect. You can even use our super hot 3D Mantle View™ to really show off your work!

Max makes it easy to share your memories with friends and family around the world. You can send any photo list to your friends so they can view the photos in your desired presentation. When you update the list, they get the new photos automatically. You just need a Microsoft Passport® network (or MSN® Hotmail) account.

Max looks and acts differently than programs you've used before. Microsoft's next-generation WinFX technology is built into Max, which allows you to create stunning visualizations of your pictures, and share and update them with your friends and family automatically.

It's proprietary, that's for sure. It does what iPhoto does with photocasting. It's a duplicate of Flickr maybe? Honestly it is hard to see what the value is here when there are so many existing solutions to this "problem". Email still works for me.

Tags: Microsoft, Pigs With Lipstick, iView, Aperture

I received a rock in the mail the other day from IBM. It came in a small box, together with a smelly card and a temperature-sensitive disk:

What an odd way to spend my money! (since I am a shareholder it really is my money, or at least a tiny bit of it is). I had to look all over the thing to figure out what they were promoting and even then I could not see why I would want it.

Marketing has one function: to communicate value. To avoid going broke most companies amend this: marketing's function is to communicate value within a reasonable and fixed budget (unless your business was called Digital Convergence and you sent out bar scanners by the truck load a few years back).

But this package seems to be missing everything. It hardly communicates and it has no value.

Tags: IBM, Pigs With Lipstick

Tom Merritt has experienced Unbox, the new movie download service from Amazon and he doesn't like it:

So, in summary, to be allowed the privilege of purchasing a video that I can't burn to DVD and can't watch on my iPod, I have to allow a program to hijack my start-up and force me to login to uninstall it? No way. Sorry, Amazon. I love a lot of what you do, but I will absolutely not recommend this service. Try again.

You would think that an internet retail pioneer would realize that there are no second tries, but somehow that has escaped them and they have rolled out this particularly odd way of losing customer loyalty and diluting their brand.

Tags: Pigs With Lipstick, Video, DVD

Here is an article written in 1999 forseeing a wave of Linux taking over the desktop, eradicating Windows as it goes:

"Are you a Microsoft investor? Be afraid. Be very afraid. By 2010 Windows will be as dead as CP/M, and every Windows-based software vendor will be either supporting Linux or out of business. The process is in fact 80% complete: The end result is already obvious to bright CEOs, and will shortly be obvious even to bright mainstream press columnists. In this essay, we will skim the available evidence, extrapolate the trend, and examine some of the mechanisms powering those trends."

Three years to go. Are we getting close? Yes and no.

The author has the desktop completely wrong: it's still Windows. The exponential effect has not materialized. But in the embedded and server worlds, we're already there. And there are actually two desktops to consider; the work desktop, and the home desktop. This essay was written pre-Mac OS X and things are rather different now. I'd wager that it's not Linux that will accomplish this change, but Mac OS X is a good contender.

Tags: Microsoft, Pigs With Lipstick, Interesting Stuff

Ars Technica reports that Microsoft is shipping an industrial design kit to OEMs (computer hardware makers) to help them make their computers visually appealing:

'The toolkit, which is delivered free of charge, contains a whole host of suggestions about how to build a PC that will fit with the look and style of Windows Vista. From color palettes to suggestions about how the power and reset buttons should appear, the kit basically describes Microsoft's vision of what a "Vista PC" should look like. The look features "accelerated curves" and "purposeful contrast," among other qualities. "We want people to fall in love with their PCs, not to simply use them to be productive and successful," reads the enclosed booklet. "We want PCs to be objects of pure desire."'

In other words, we want you to abandon your effective, hard-earned brand recognition to our effective, hard-earned brand recognition, so your reputation can sink as low as ours.

Tags: Pigs With Lipstick, Microsoft

Wiva Vac USA has one up on the Flowbee: the Nasal Aspirator, otherwise known as a Snot Vacuum, setting a new high in the efforts of parents intent on terrorizing their children with vacuum cleaner attachments.

Tags: Pigs With Lipstick, Snot

It looks like my prediction from January 2006 has come to fruition: Microsoft has announced that it will sell its own music player. Actually I predicted that they would ship one, and that has not happened yet, so I'm not 100% right. And I'm at least partly wrong because I said the reason they would do it would be to bail out their licensees who have failed with subscription-based music. Whatever it is, they are saying that it is incompatible with everything that is currently on the market: new DRM, new everything. So that's not the reason. Maybe I was right for the wrong reason.

From Slashdot comes this gem:

Zune's a name like Tune, (how odd!)
Just lacks an 'i' and lacks a 'Pod'.

With marketing and Xbox gloss
They'll gain a share but take the loss.

With 40 billion stock bought back
Ballmer might just dodge the sack.

But Jobs would say the chance is slim,
and silhouettes will come for him.

Tags: Microsoft, Pigs With Lipstick

Intel has sold a part of its communications processor business to Marvell for $600m, admitting that it made a large error when it bought the businesses for $3b to $5b.

The thing is, and Intel may now realize this, is that it's not about the chips. It's about the software. Anything that increases time to market (writing or porting mode code for instance) has got to buy its purchaser a very significant advantage in the market; and Intel's chips could not overcome this barrier.

XScale is rumored to be on the chopping block as well.

Tags: Pigs With Lipstick

WinFS, the all-singing, all-dancing object storage system that was supposed to be delivered with Longhorn/Vista and was then removed, to be a separate product, is dead.

Worse than not delivering is that Microsoft is showing generations of software engineers and designers what cannot (or should not) be done. As these people move on, this knowledge spreads to competitors and the successful implementation of the ideas is more likely elsewhere. Part of the Microsoft malaise is that it is stuck in a pattern of Grand Thinking that requires a small number of really big ideas to succeed for the company to succeed.

Tags: Microsoft, Pigs With Lipstick

Theme Park Review has a scathing look at Fantazy Land in Alexandria, Egypt. It's more of an abandoned building site than a theme park, and much, much worse than Jim Bakker's attempt.

Tags: Pigs With Lipstick, Fun