Category: marketing

os x server is junk!

Apple linux marketing

People see the shiny rack mountable Apple Servers. And then they make the mistake to buy them. Don’t! They are way to expensive. But the worst is, that they are impossible to administrate: It’s pretty much all different. And then when you spent hours and hours to go through the documentation you just have to realize that what you need is simply not there.

I wanted to change the default umask for a user that creates files on the afp server. Too bad. Not possible.

Using mac laptops since years I get to appreciate that the computer is not getting into the way when I want to do things.
Linux is a bit different, you have to google a bit for what you want to do. But 80% of it is pretty damn easy. OS X is just plain obscure. It really is a waste of time. Nobody should be believe that you actually got a unix box when you buy OS X server. What you get is some perverted BSD box that no sane sysadmin would like to deal with it. Phew.

Just try to use a device under OS X (server or not) if you have any doubts.

worth 1000

internet marketing media

worth the visit

digital cameras according to flickr

internet marketing

Flickr had a nice idea: tracking which cameras are being used by it’s members.

It used to be that consumer data was expensive to gather and somewhat imprecise. In some areas this is not the case anymore. I reckon that Nikon and Canon did spend some serious money in the past to track market share. Maybe there is a way for Yahoo! to make a couple of thousand US$. They need it.

ERs of the world prepare

internet marketing media

Wii Commerical

Lots and lots of views on the good ole youTube. Who needs to buy airtime if its lingering around for free.
For about one out of thousand commercials that people do care about enough to seek them out.

starbucks stole christmas

marketing

it’s called a ‘tradition’
For years Christmas was called ‘Holidays’. Now it get’s renamed as a ‘tradition’. Is that new or bad? Certainly not. After all we all know where Santa got his outfit from.

update: Ad Age about the starbucks campaign
It seems as if I did not get why it was on blogsnow where I found it.

vertRamp

history internet marketing media

Mark Cuban gives a name to the other end of the long tail: “Vert Ramp”

into the face with the interface

communication economy marketing

“The interface of a cheeseburger” is one of these Blog entries that validate those 30 Million other blogs with random noise in one simple swoop. If you ever contemplated to create anything that get’s used by a human, be it nuclear power plant, condom or breakfirst table for your dearest one, you could find some great insight in this text from Oliver Reichenstein. At least I think it’s by him. While content and form of the text are pretty nice it seems almost a relief that ‘Information Architects Japan’ messed up the branding for themselves. Sticking Lego’s on business cards won’t help either. Die Kinder des Schuhmachers tragen immer kaputte Schuhe.

bravia

communication confessions of a pixel pusher marketing Sony

Conceptually it was a well intended follow up: Sony’s Bravia commercial using exploding paint instead of many balls.

Execution wise there certainly are amazing explosions. There are few good camera angles. But most of them are, well, uninspired. The idea of using an abandoned housing project is interesting. Somewhat. I have just seen to many of them being blown up. Somehow you expect them to sink together once they become the object of the camera. But it was not this non delivering on the expectation that broke the spot. It was the unispired music choice together with that I call dismal editing. I can only write this, since I have not looked up yet who did it. It’s easier that way. And I am sure it was the usual clusterfuck of decission making or pure lack therof that pushed this brilliant idea of a follow up into the lower ends of mediocricy. The sport lives from the real Bravia. Not more, not less. A typical sequell that can’t deliver. Too bad they blew it.

why flash sucks (continued)

internet marketing

Just wondered what a Mini S would cost. They have a website. They have a ‘configurator’. After 5 minutes of trying they lost me. I do have a fast computer am behind a 3-tier T1 and still the website was useless.
I kind of know what a Mini would cost, sure. But I wonder how many people really endure such a crappy interface. Typical case of broken feedback loop: BMW feels they need a ‘configurator’. Since everybody hacks them together in flash they do so as well. The ‘designers’ present it probably on a local network, and nobody analyses the actual CTR and usage on the site once it is up.
Next new car the same people get the job again. Another 100K down the drain …

everywhere

marketing

Ads on super market conveyer belts

I wonder why such stuff still gets PR. There are ads on the breakfirst egg, on the paper towel in the public bathroom. If there are blank square inches where human eyeballs come to rest, then some ‘marketing’ person will ‘invent’ a way to put an add there. What’s there to report about it?

Most of it is stupid and it folds. Those abandoned attempts just clutter our surroundings. Like the flat screens in the back seats of a cab in Boston. Outofdate rubbish starts blaring in your direction every five minutes or so. Easy to click off. But still annoying.

One of the best comments on this useless trajectory of the current society was the rsstroom reader last December.