| Monday, October 22, 2007 |
15:58 - Your artistic license has expired
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/04/technology/04zune.html?_r=1&oref=slogin
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Oh boy, these guys are hip:
Microsoft has taken pains to associate the Zune with the cachet of up-and-coming artists. In the Zune developers’ offices, a D.J. turntable setup sits near flat-screen televisions playing animated segments featuring robots and biplanes.
Well, that sounds positively dreadful. What, do they also have a cartoon character dancing around going "I'm the rappin' goblin and I'm here to say, stayin' in school is A-okay!"?
Man, what a marvelous work environment. And so spontaneous! No wonder the word "Zune" has become so synonymous with desirability.
In promoting the new social-networking site Tuesday, Microsoft executives showed Mr. Gates’s own profile, listing the Irish folk-punk group the Pogues and the Latin Playboys, a blues-rock-acid-folk group, as his favorites — a use, Mr. Gates said, of “artistic license” by Microsoft’s marketers.
As evariste says:
This is sooo pathetic. Can you bear it? It's unbearable. The contempt oozing from every pore of Microsoft for their customers, that not only would the marketing team think of this, but that Gates would approve the idea. "Sure, go ahead and put a fake profile of me on Zune Social, and have me pretend I like whatever...horrible bands you think the kids are into these days." Authenticity? Not in Microsoft's DNA, I guess. How can anyone participate in such dishonest fakery and feel good about themselves? For crying out loud.
This is the company that couldn't come up with anyone to honestly tout their products at the grass-roots level, so they created one out of marketing-ese and royalty-free clip-art.
But it takes a special kind of clueless hubris to play the "creepy uncle who likes what the kids like" card, doesn't it?
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Brian Tiemann
