Great new Microsoft Ad - The Homeless guy

So Microsoft have released a number of ads recently getting various people the opportunity to look for a laptop with certain specs under a price limit. The actors give off the appearance of giving Macs a chance but then see the prices and go running to Windows laptops... I am still using Windows as my OS and don't think I'll change, for me arrogance is something I despise and the arrogance that Apple's oozes puts me right off (though I may be getting an iPhone, maybe...)

Here is the latest ad with the homeless guy:



The one thing about this is that the homeless guy is like 'What the f$#k do I need a laptop for...' make sure you check out the end and what its used for in the end!

Is it possible to get a Mac under $1000?

This is the question Microsoft posed in their latest ad promoting their PC's. They got a waitress and told her if she can find the laptop she wants under $1000 they'll buy it for her - she goes shopping, take a look.

<a href="http://video.msn.com/?mkt=en-US&amp;playlist=videoByUuids:uuids:0bb6a07c-c829-4562-8375-49e6693810c7&amp;showPlaylist=true&amp;from=shared" target="_new" title="Laptop Hunters $1000 &#8211; Lauren Gets an HP Pavilion">Video: Laptop Hunters $1000 &#8211; Lauren Gets an HP Pavilion</a>

For me I'll definitely be getting a new Windows laptop when Windows 7 comes out and the closest I'll come to a MAC is possibly getting an iPhone.

A great 'banned' Xbox 360 advert

Apparently this was banned because it was making 'light' of killing people, personally I just think its pretty funny and the sound effects are great - take a look:

YouTube as/is a search engine

Recently on the NY Times there was an article on how a 9year old kid was using YouTube to do research on an Australian animal.

Is this the real reason why Google bought YouTube?

To control all areas and methods of searching? The 9 year old said that he uses YouTube if needs help in some of his video games or on his card collection, if he can't find what he's looking for on YouTube he'll use one of the other search engines.

Now according to comScore in November last year people in American did nearly 200million more searches on YouTube than on Yahoo, this moved Yahoo into third spot for search engines.

Surely Microsoft and Yahoo must be wondering how this has happened, how another website (one that is owned by Google) has surpassed them in the number of searches run.

Currently YouTube is busy setting up deals with Sony and Nintendo to be able to allow their users to search and view YouTube videos via the game consoles on the TV, notably not on the Xbox.

I give it another 5 years before we don't even need a satellite/cable service for our TV's but simply connect our TV to the internet and watch everything through that. And why not, currently we just PVR/TiVo everything and fast forward the ads, why not just select what you want to watch and download it or stream it to your TV.

Goodbye to the big TV satellite companies...

Windows 3.1 comes to an end...

Wow, what an end of an era - on the 1st November 2008 Microsoft officially stopped issuing licenses for the software that made its debut in 1990.

I remember first using it in the early '90s and I like the graphical interface but still preferred MS DOS as I felt I had more control over the system I think people using PC's for the first time would have preffered the graphical user interface just because of the ease of use compared to using MS DOS.

I actually (bit embarrassing) used to think that they were competing companies... MS DOS vs MS Windows, it took me a while to realise they were the same company. Bare in mind I was only about 10 or 11 at the time.

Microsoft maintained support for Windows 3.x until the end of 2001 and since then it has lived on as en embedded operating system used mostly on some of the Virgin Atlantic and Quantas long haul flights to power the in-flight entertainment systems. I wonder why they used that to power their systems? Will have to look into it.

The Old specs on Windows 3.1 was the following

8086/8088 processor or better

with a clock speed of up to 10MHz

at least 640kb of RAM and 7 megabytes of hard drive space

and a graphics card that supported CGA, EGA and VGA

My first computer was defintely had a CGA graphics card and was something along the lines of a 8086... wow, my little cellphone kicks that computers but!

Yahoo shares sore...

Jerry Yang has or is stepping down as CEO of Yahoo! and today the shares of Yahoo! rose by 11.19% to a whopping $11.82...

My how the shareholders must still dream about Microsoft offering them £33 per share... I wonder if their was some conspiracy between Google and Microsoft to wipe Yahoo out a bit as they have both dropped Yahoo in the last couple of months.

Facebook SA about to reach 1million users

So recently some stats was released on the numbers of people on Facebook and the fastest growing countries etc, SA is very close to crossing the 1 million mark and I reckon if you had to include the Saffas living in London and elsewhere we would easily be over the 1million mark.

It was quite strange to see that in the 3rd quarter Facebook's traffic decreased by 1% in SA.... strange. I've been working with Facebook Apps quite a bit and have a wishlist app out now that works off the MyKindaPrices database and allows users to create a wishlist and their friends to view it and book items to buy. Now, people often talk about Facebook been the next Operating System but in order for it to work they would need servers in every country cause at the moment the way it works is as follows:

1) You're logged into Facebook
2) You click onto the MyKindaPrices App
3) Request is sent from your pc to Facebook servers in the US, they in turn send request to our servers in Joburg which starts returning the data via the Facebook servers in the USA which in turn the relays it to your PC here in SA.

That is quite a bit of a round about and it not the quickest way to do things, Facebook obviously needs to make it secure and this is the only way.

Microsoft just launched Microsoft Live Search on Facebook, now as Facebook has 135million users this could improve their search market share if everyone runs 10 searches a month on it... but I would still prefer localised search results, maybe they should use Google for that!

Just to update everyone in case you didn't know - Google and Yahoo have put their deal on hold while they wait for the authorities to OK the deal. They were planning to just go ahead with things.

Bill Gates & Jerry Seinfeld - Advert #2

Since going live yesterday and been posted on YouTube it has already received 120,000 views and that was just this video I've embedded below and not the shortened edition...

Take a quick look




Now as you can see its sort of following on from what Hollywood have been doing with reality TV and putting people like Paris Hilton with odd families for awhile and seeing how they cope. As you can see in the family its an odd family with a crazy Grandmother.

I think they are trying to bring across the fact that Bill Gates and Jerry Seinfeld are as normal as you and me (besides their billions of dollars they have). The review on TechCrunch was of still been confused but the comments afterwards were pretty good and people seem to be warming up to it.

One item pointed out is that this ad is over 4minutes long, if you are watching your daily show like 'The Office' and this ad comes on - people who are fans of Jerry Seinfeld will watch the whole 4minutes of it. At least its better than soap/cleaning adverts on TV.

Steven made the following comment on TechCrunch

the “billions” of people watching the ads aren’t tech bloggers and admitted apple fans trying to analyze the ad to figure out why they should be buy ms products.

the ads are what they are, a funny attempt to connect to the public and brand microsoft using one of the most popular comics of all time. microsoft isn’t trying to reach any of the people who read this or any other tech blog with any kind of frequency. we know about the major software companies and be you an apple, open-source or m$ft fan-boy, you are not the audience. joe six-pack, the average american who uses their computer at home an hour or two a day is the audience. how is this complicated?

personally, i thought the first ad was okay, this second ad was pretty funny with the exception of the last :10. and i’d wager that most of middle america probably will find these ads funny and bring the brand microsoft back to their conversations. i mean, look at the conversation it’s creating here. job done in my opinion.

I am starting to agree, you can't look at it as one commercial but rather a whole story line with a number of commercials.

Seinfeld & Gates - their first ad...

The long-awaited $300 million ad campaign that Microsoft launched to counter Apple’s successful “I’m a Mac, I’m a PC” campaign aired on Thursday night in the US and I managed to find it on YouTube this morning.

Its pretty darn random and I'm not too sure what the punchline is, the only thing what was quite funny was seeing Bill Gates do a little ass shake... Not many people are getting it and the only thing I could hope they're trying to do is to confuse everyone and draw them in and then follow up with some better ads.

Take a look and let me know what you think, I'd say its 90 seconds of old men trying on shoes and been stupid. It was quite funny seeing Bill Gates trying on shoes and displaying his discount card. Take a look and see for yourself...




Bloggers are saying that this has nothing to do with Microsoft and Apple but it does hint at what the future of Microsoft could be and according to the ad its going to be 'delicious'. If Jerry Seinfeld gets $10 million for that then that is just ridiculous, some of the comments on YouTube were even saying they'd lost their respect for Jerry.

Microsoft is trying to spread the advert virally and put it up on YouTube - that must have really got the hairs on their back going! They're trying to rebrand their image but have to use their rivals website to promote it, ha ha.

What are your thoughts on the matter?

Google and Mozilla in bed together for another 3 years

Recently Mozilla announced that it just renewed an agreement with Google that it will be assigning Google's search engine as Firefox's default. This agreement has been extended until November 2011.

Now if you are wondering how dependent Mozilla is on Firefox just look at the financial records for Mozilla from the 2006 tax year - around 85% or $57million came from Google.

Now their formal CEO has committed Mozilla to remaining independent and that if their relationship with Google threatens this in any way they will walk away from the millions it collects. Read more here.

Mozilla has come under some criticism from users with some names like 'Googzilla or GoogleFox' been thrown around but Baker still defends the position and claims that the community will always come first for Mozilla and that there are other ways to generate money.

From my perspective I don't see this as a bad thing or something that threatens Mozilla, if Google started to dictate conditions to Mozilla then it could be different. In the 2 years since the first deal with Google, Mozilla's market share has increased from 11.8% to 19.2% (article here)

So now on something slightly different, Microsoft has bought out the shopping comparison site Ciao for a sum of $486million. This is a mainly UK shopping comparison and review site that receives 26million people a month. This move has received some criticism and people are wondering why Microsoft did this? Ballmer has set aside $1.2billion per year to play catch up on Google, wouldn't this money have been better spent replacing the Google Search Engine on Mozilla's Firefox with Live Search?

If Firefox has almost 20% of the market share I would definitely think that getting that contract would have been far beneficial. I'm not sure what the anti-competitive people in the USA would have thought about that move though...

In case you wondering or you just don't know - users can change the default search engine on Firefox to a rival site if they wish too.