Operation Vaporwatch’s First Victim Announced

 Vaporwatch  No Responses »
Apr 292010
 

When I started Vaporwatch, I half-believed that Microsoft would actually release one of the breakthrough products it was “developing”. After all, the trick of announcing a product whose sole purpose was to deflate enthusiasm for competitors’ real products was just becoming too obvious and well-worn – even for Microsoft.

Well, now that Apple’s iPad has sold more than a million units in less than a month in only one country, M$ has decided to make me look like a genius by “leaking” to Gizmodo that it was time for Courier to give up the ghost.

"I wanna show you something - it's my shocked face."

I have to give them credit: Classic Redmond would have dragged the charade on for another year before burying it. Guess they figured spending another half a million on a “concept video” that had zero impact on Apple’s real product in the same space was wasteful. It’s not like Microsoft is any stranger to setting money on fire.  Aside from losing billions every quarter trying to push consumer electronics that no one wants, they periodically burn haybales of capital on some of the worst advertising in the business. Using that criteria, axing Courier qualifies as one of the most sensible marketing decisions Microsoft has made in the last decade.

So while the comment sections of Gizmodo are aghast with shock and mourn the premature death of a device that no doubt would have changed the face of mobile computing – even though it never had a corresponding presence in the physical universe – the sane among us knew there was a better chance of being mauled by a polar bear and a regular bear in the same day than of the Courier seeing the light of day.

 Posted by JT at 8:23 pm  Tagged with: , ,

Operation Vaporwatch: Courier

 Vaporwatch  No Responses »
Apr 132010
 

The Courier

As buzz was building to a crescendo about the Apple tablet that will eventually become the iPad, other me-too tablet announcements begin to trickle in. Not willing to let a superior product out of the gates before performing the trick they made famous, Microsoft begins “leaking” concept videos of a stylus-driven, dual-screen touchscreen tablet. You see, M$ has more than one vaporware tactic. Sometimes they’ll make a big announcement at a consumer electronics show a year and a half before their real product is slated to ship. Sometimes their corporate security periodically disintegrates, “revealing” products to eager tech sites like Engadget and Gizmodo, who unwittingly post their “scoops” while Microsoft laughs at the continued gullibility of tech media.

At companies that make real products, a leak like Courier would set off a nuclear device in the boardroom. Letting competition know the form factor, features or technology present in your forthcoming devices is a recipe for disaster. Fortunately for Microsoft, when these “leaks” hit the tech landscape, they usually don’t represent a design worth copying, don’t reveal any technical details about the product, and are immediately recognized by potential competitors for what they are. Much like the Wizard of Oz, the awesomeness of the apparition belies the nothingness of the reality.  So here’s what we “know” about the Courier:

September, 2009: Microsoft “leaks” an animated concept video of a tablet device known as Courier to Engadget. Despite the “concept” not having specs, price, OS, or release date (wouldn’t want to kill the enthusiasm with all that), the incredibly detailed animation, spanning 1:55, inspires commenter cries of “Microsoft is back!”, which I took as an incomplete blurt that ends something like “…to creating representations for which no actual product is intended”, since that is clearly their strength.

November 2009: A video detailing the Courier’s user interface is “leaked” to Gizmodo (hey, the wealth must be shared), because the more detailed the non-product, the more effective the “stopping power”. Engadget uses the curious term “advanced proof of concept”, which is usually reserved for products that “can be built” as opposed to those that “can be drawn”. Unfortunately, Microsoft doesn’t seem to realize that no one buys their particular shovelful of bullshit anymore – except commenters on tech websites. A “Highest Ranked” comment on Engadget reads: “This isn’t a laptop without a keyboard, it’s a new device designed from the ground up to be controlled with a pen and multitouch gestures.” That one cost TMA a mouthful of coffee and almost a wireless keyboard. Engadget follows up with Steve Ballmer and pointedly asks about the device. His response, according to Engadget, is that “he swears he hasn’t actually seen it, but that it sounds like it’s something someone should make”.  Readers are left to decide for themselves whether the CEO of the company can really be so out of touch with its groundbreaking products or if the comment was just a really retarded attempt at coyness.

March 2010: Another Courier video is “leaked” to Engadget, showing how the device’s…animation…has evolved. Amazingly, even though 6 months have passed since the previous animation (which one might assume would go into the development of an actual product), the same absolute lack of details remain.

April 2010: Apple releases the iPad to extremely positive reviews. Despite being released on a Saturday, sales figures for the weekend top those of the original iPhone, indicating once again that in a market where people exchange money for actual products, Apple reigns supreme.

 Posted by JT at 10:34 am  Tagged with: , ,

Operation Vaporwatch: Project Natal

 Vaporwatch  No Responses »
Apr 082010
 

Like a bloated lion, Microsoft waits for other, more innovative companies to launch products before waddling to market, bellowing the entire saunter from their shaded tree about how awesome their product is going to be. The idea being that competition would be discouraged from mobilizing and people who still hadn’t made a purchase decision would be frozen, waiting for M$’s entry. Sometimes they’d make it to market; most of the time they didn’t. Back in the days of Longhorn, an OS that was slated to succeed XP and was heavily promoted with fanciful technologies yet somehow never made it to market, this trick worked pretty well. It essentially killed innovation in the computer and consumer electronics spaces, but what the fuck, it made Microsoft money – or it least prevented it from flowing to its competition.

Nowadays, everyone in tech is wise to Microsoft’s vaporware bait-and-ditch tactics. Yet incredibly, the company continues to juice markets with nothing backing up their claims to enter them besides a “concept animation”. If there’s anything in the market that smells a little like innovation, you can bet Redmond will announce their better, more powerful version coming soon, soon, soon! Commenters in Gizmodo and Engadget spring their collective wood, actually expecting a product to be released in their lifetime. Think Charlie Brown, Lucy and a football.

As a public service to the community, TMA has decided to keep track of some of Microsoft’s “coming soon” technologies that, although are still very early in development, hasn’t stopped the company from showing off celebrity demos and producing very detailed animations of how their “products” will work. I call this service “Operation Vaporwatch”. Let’s start with Microsoft’s latest gaming vapor…

Project Natal

Jun 1, 2009: In a move no doubt intended to staunch the arterial bleeding inflicted by Nintendo’s Wii on the XBox 360, Microsoft unveils a super-advanced motion-sensing set top device with the code name Project Natal (as in Nepal, not dreidel). The device is announced with no ship date and no price, but plenty of fanfare. Its demo videos and celebrity endorsements are the talk of the 2009 E3. In a follow-up confirmation from Ballmer himself, Natal is to be released before the end of 2010. You read that right: 18 months from the product’s announcement. Try to think of a product in the tech space – any tech product – that gets announced a year and a half before its scheduled release. TMA immediately calls horse

Jun 3, 2009: In what TMA will later refer to as part of “the Wonka Factory Tour”, during which Gizmodo editors are walked through Microsoft’s product development centers in exchange for fair and balanced reporting, Mark Wilson and Matt Buchanan are treated to exclusive access to Natal’s 3D Breakout and Burnout Revenge demos. A “small PC and camera that simulates the final Natal rig” are used. One would assume the PC will not come with Natal when it does ship. No specs of said PC are divulged. Also missing is any photo or video of the actual gameplay experience – something that might actually mark the performance of the PC-enhanced units or – you know – build an actual buzz. Regardless, both editors rave about “immersiveness”. The resulting unbiased review is titled “Testing Project Natal: We Touched the Intangible”.

June 2009 – Jan 2010: Redmond is overrun by crickets. Payload delivered.

Jan 7, 2010: According to a statement from Alex Kipman, Natal’s chief developer, Natal still exists and the add-on will consume a meager 15% of the XBox 360′s processing power, or in laymen’s terms 40 dB.

Feb 23, 2010: MTV clocks the lag between body movements and the corresponding on-screen output at 1/10 second. FPS games from 1995 point and laugh.

 Posted by JT at 10:27 am  Tagged with: , ,

Think Microsoft only does 3 things well?

 Uncategorized  No Responses »
Feb 112010
 

And by “well”, I mean profitably. All of M$’s profitable business unit products go back over 10 years.

 Posted by JT at 12:36 pm  Tagged with: ,

The iPad: Losers and Winners

 Uncategorized  3 Responses »
Feb 042010
 

After over a year of analyst frothing, Apple announced the next step in its transformation of consumer electronics devices. The 2 predictable results of Apple’s announcement – the immediate sell-off of Apple stock and the collective feigned disinterest of Windoz apologists across the country – belies the truth. This is a device that will change the way people will interact with content. So you can click through to dumbasses like Thurrott or Dvorak as they lather themselves up over missing non-features like no buttons for games or no stylus, or you can take the word of someone who claims to know 1% as much, but is much more frequently right. Future’s here people.

So as many denial-riddled pundits yawn at SJ’s claim that “this is the most important thing I’ve ever worked on” (which would include the iMac, the iPod and the iPhone, to name a few), several other businesses are making messes in their shorts – and not the euphoric kind of mess. So now that the iPad’s here, who wins and who loses? Here’s Part 1 of a quick round-up, starting with the losers.

Adobe

When Apple made it clear that they had no interest porting Flash to the iPhone, many analysts shrugged it off as an anomaly. I mean: Flash is ubiquitous on the web and Apple always did weird shit like this. Besides, Adobe was working its plow improving a stripped down version of Flash that would sip battery power like a hummingbird and play super nice with mobile browsers. Just wait for the next version…or the next one. Anyway, even if Apple never adopted Flash and grabbed 50% of the smartphone market, it was only a small percentage of the entire mobile device market. There were still plenty of people to maintain Adobe’s Flash as the de facto runtime on the web, right?

Well the iPhone and now the iPad won’t support it. And Google doesn’t care much for it either. And now Firefox is switching off plug-ins by default for its RC3 Maemo mobile browser, in essence because Flash is a hog. HTML5 support is picking up. And up. Technorati everywhere are going on record as plainly stating that Flash is a dog and HTML5 is the wave of the future. Adobe’s response to the threat: Flash is everywhere. Sound familiar? Keep throwing up your Bang Bros. references to the ubiquity of Flash, guys. Jig’s up. Might not happen this year, but it’s happening: you’re fucked.

Amazon

Poor Jeff Bezos. After all that work getting the eInk technology to perfectly mirror a dead form of media interaction, Apple has to come out with a device that does 20 times as much and a ridiculously competitive price point. That whimpering you hear is no longer the effect Kindle is having on the eBook market; it’s now coming from the CEO’s office. First he’s going to get to see sales of his devices freeze (not that we ever knew how many they sold) and then he’ll get to see his margins – if there ever were any – crash through the floor.

But there’s hope! Amazon just acquired Touchco, a maker of multitouch panels, so a touch version of the Kindle is surely on its way. Because didn’t Apple get multitouch by acquiring Fingerworks? You just plug that shit right into your business model and – BAM! iPad competitor! Right? Right?

Guys, seriously: kick the clown shoes under the bed. A minor feature of one of Apple’s products just buried you.

The Windoz Ecosystem

Granted, no one expects Redmond to respond to the iPad with anything that anyone would rather use (except maybe Paul Thurrortt). But in typical Microsoft fashion, they’ll make a lot of noise about it and respond with something underwhelming. It won’t be the Courier, because the Courier is a bullshit cloud of vapor that smells exactly like Cairo, Longhorn, etc. The only people who’ve made money off the Courier are the people working for the design firm who did the rendering for this non-device. HP, who had the distinguished honor of having their tablet device fondled my Steve Ballmer’s sweaty mitts onstage at CES, is one known entry. Lenovo is another. M$ will respond not with some innovative take on slate computing, but with some bastardization of Windows 7. It will be a customized assemblage of some commodity PC giblets made to look like an iPad to a drunk 6 year old. Because M$ has been playing the me-too game with Apple for at least the last 15 years, and because the cash they spew into this space will have little – if any – return, M$ is clearly in the loser’s column, which should shock no one. Their unfortunate hardware partners, who really don’t have much of a choice, will be dragged right down with them.

Google

Google’s a loser on 2 fronts. First, as the always-brilliant Daniel Eran Dilger points out, the Google model of advertising is much more compelling on desktop and laptop devices (if you can use the word “compelling” to describe the experience of getting targeted ads dumped on your browsing experience). On devices like the iPhone, the probability of people clicking on an ad is much lower. People don’t want to rabbit-trail ads on mobile devices; they want access to the content they’re looking for. Apple’s iPad, while allowing for a greater surface to browse the web like a laptop, still sticks with the iPhone’s touch model, which one would think would continue to discourage ad clicks. More people using iPads to browse the web means fewer people using laptops and desktops. The value of Google to advertisers drops. Some content providers may even prefer to go to a subscription model instead of trying (and almost always failing – or producing content like 99% of the toiletries that dominate tech websites) to get advertising to support their online presences. Apple does subscription models pretty well. Less business for Google

The second front is Google’s suggestion that they’re going to compete with the iPad with a port of Chrome to a tablet device. Maybe Google will shop their tablet-ready versions of the OS to some device-makers before branding their own device, something I’m sure mobile device makers and carriers loved when they did it with Android and the Nexus One. Funny thing is: this business keeps falling for the “Lucy/Charlie Brown field goal” trick perfected by Microsoft. Google’s insistence on continuing to invest money in making inferior OS ports that compete with Apple products lands them smack in the middle of Failsberg.

Next up: the Winners

 Posted by JT at 5:56 pm  Tagged with: , ,

The Microsoft Store: I hope you shorted that stock

 Uncategorized  1 Response »
Oct 262009
 

To say it is a laughable copy of an Apple Store is really understating it.

If I were an investor in Microsoft, I’d really, really want to know how they’re going to track the financial performance of these things.  Bury them in the “Entertainment and Devices Division”?  These stores – which sell nothing that you couldn’t get cheaper online and offer you no level of service beyond telling you that your PC-maker screwed you over – will fail.  And quickly.

 Posted by JT at 2:43 pm  Tagged with: ,

Ed Bott, ZDNet: I’ve got a box for you to uncheck!

 Uncategorized  2 Responses »
Sep 302009
 

Pity poor Ed Bott.  Aside from being one of the most transparent Microsoft shills beating the tech pavement, he is also a sometime user of Apple’s products, which must be hell for a M$ apologist.  One of the prerequisites for being a really effective Micronaut is that you have to feign respect for Apple – sort of how your closeted racist cousin claims to “have a number of black friends”.  You see, this front allows him to seem like a fair critic‚ while also letting him play the outraged user and bash Apple at every turn.

Ed’s latest shaken fist is over Apple’s bundling of the iPhone Configuration Utility with his update of iTunes.  Being the vigilant watchman he is, he was immediately wise to Apple’s game.

update copy

THEY LEFT THE CHECKBOX CHECKED!  Such incursion; such violation!

This isn’t the first time Apple has tried to bundle other software with updates for iTunes, which gives birth to Ed’s clever click-bait title: “Apple up to its old tricks, pushing unwanted software onto PCs”.

I’ll let you soak in the irony of the title for a moment.  Funny huh?

It gets better.  Because I like to point out irony to Windows enthusiasts (who by their very definition have no sense of irony), I’ll bang out a sentence or two in the comments section of webskid like Ed’s article.  Most of the time, doing so requires that you register at the site.  Undaunted by the time and effort required to create a user name and password at ZDNet (and stifling the urge to shower immediately afterward), I was treated to the following:

joinZD

Note the three checked boxes to the right.  HOW DARE THEY CHECK MY BOXES FOR ME?!

So, I chuckle at the bonus irony and uncheck the boxes.  No thanks, boys.  Then I get the confirmation email:

ummno

I wish to WHAT?  Not only do I have to UNCLICK MY OWN CHECKBOXES on the site where Ed cries his self-righteous tears of injustice, I’m being spammed by them anyway?  Are you for real?  Well, obviously, I want to change my newsletter preferences from “no, don’t send me shit” to “really I fucking meant “don’t send me shit” when I unclicked those checkboxes”.  So I click the link to change my preferences and:

areyoufkingkidding

Wow. You want more information about me in exchange for the privilege of unsubscribing from spam that I should have never been on a list for to begin with?

To recap:

1. Ed Bott bitches about Apple’s software update foisting things on his PC he doesn’t need – that is, if he doesn’t understand that a checkmark in a box means he will in fact be downloading these things.

2. To register to leave comments on Ed Bott’s site, ZDNet‚ you have to uncheck 3 boxes to prevent you from being spammed by them.

3. Unclicking a checkbox on ZDNet apparently doesn’t mean what Apple thinks it means.  ZDNet still spams you.

4. You have to provide ZDNet with more information about yourself in order to really, really unregister for the shit you shouldn’t have been getting in the first place.

I mean, as a Mac guy who likes to laugh at Wintards, I’m all about the low-hanging fruit, but this even makes me a little embarrassed.

 Posted by JT at 11:51 pm  Tagged with: ,

Windows 7 Launch Party Instructional Video: BYOB

 Uncategorized  No Responses »
Sep 242009
 

If you’re the kind of person that tries to rope friends into helping you move‚ claiming it’ll be “fun” and offering a cold beer in lieu of money‚ Microsoft has an idea for you: the Windows 7 launch party.  They’ve even posted a video how-to guide‚ with a somewhat incomplete list of suggested activities.  What happened to “pin the driver on the peripheral” or the “custom install app registration code treasure hunt”?

winparty2

If you choose to host‚ I’d recommend a strict designated driver policy.

 Posted by JT at 10:09 am  Tagged with: ,

New Windows 7 ad looks to spur mass adoption

 Uncategorized  No Responses »
Sep 222009
 

Remember Kylie?  She’s the cute four-and-a-half year-old who figured out how to download pictures from her camera to her PC, apply image correction to the photos and email them using a distribution list – all in Microsoft’s Windows Live.

Yeah, I didn’t quite buy it either.

Seems Kylie may be the next Jerry Seinfeld for the brand.  Not content to let an ad campaign stand by itself, Kylie has appeared in a crossover ad for Windows 7.  Using her legendary computer skills, she even puts together a slick slideshow with some of 7′s most positive reviews:

Advertising challenge 101: plot the demographic for this ad.

Advertising challenge: plot the demographic for this ad.

I honestly can’t tell if they’re leveling themselves or if they believe they’re actually targeting viewers.  That Redmond ad group is one wacky fun machine.

 Posted by JT at 10:11 pm  Tagged with: , ,

Zune App Store redefines business model

 Uncategorized  No Responses »
Sep 172009
 

The way I redefined the aria.

9 apps taking from 8 to 30 seconds to load.  And this:

What will it take to get you into this Kia? from Ars Technica on Vimeo.

Advertising.  What did you expect?  They are free‚ you know.

 Posted by JT at 9:44 am  Tagged with: , ,
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