See also Terminology Watch: “Blogola”
The great PR cock-up (Neville Hobson): Edelman, already in hot water over its Wal-Mart flogging campaign, demonstrates once again the inadvisability of rewarding failure by maintaining the architects of a massively failed strategy in positions of responsibility.
In Edelman’s case, however, what can you do?
It’s a family business.
We do note, however, that Edelman’s Institute for Democracy, Politics and the Internet has apparently vanished from cyberspace, or had, at least, the last time we checked.
That’s certainly a start.
Because the “synergies” between Edelman’s government and private-sector clients are the most disturbing phenomenon of all [cough:abramoff].
1. A few days before Christmas, Microsoft (or Edelman — the lead PR agency for the launch of [Microsoft’s] Vista [operating system] — depending on which blog post you read) emailed a number of influential US bloggers to ask them if they’d like to receive an Acer Ferrari notebook computer pre-loaded with Vista.
[…] while I hope you will blog about your experience with the pc, you don’t have to. Also, you are welcome to send the machine back to us after you are done playing with it, or you can give it away to your community, or you can hold onto it for as long as you’d like. Just let me know what you plan to do with it when the time comes.
3. Bloggers start posting about the invitation they received; some have already received the computer and blog their first impressions/opinions.
4. Others criticize Microsoft and Edelman with accusations of bribery. Words such as ‘astroturfing,’ ‘payola’ and ‘PayPerPost’ abound.
5. Confusion starts to take hold as some bloggers report that Microsoft is asking for the computers back.
6. The first murmurings start that this is another developing ethics scandal for Edelman.
I find this interesting for personal reasons as well: I recently purchased an Acer Ferrari myself, a floor demo from FNAC Pinheiros, here in São Paulo, that was marked down from $R8,000 to $R1,15000 because — I am told in confidence — they failed to move any off the shelves.
See Don’t Bug Me, I’m Hacking.
And you know what?
From the point of view of a bargain-hunting, bumbling hacker in the classic sense — he who metaphorically just bangs the thing against the wall until it starts working for some only half-understood reason — I have nothing especially bad to say about it.
Except that I resent paying for an operating system I am never going to use, because I find it to be a consumer rights-abusing black box full of Orwellian vaporware.
First thing that I do when I get home: wipe the hard disk and throw the OS CD in the trash.
Then pop in an Ubuntu Live CD.
Except maybe that I am not really seeing what the hell is so great about 64-bit versus 32-bit computing, for my purposes. I prefer my 32-bit dual-core Centrino experience, but that is in the shop at the moment. Or would be if Dell had a shop around here.
Gatos safados pissed on the keyboard.
Which is what I can never really understand about Intel: As a consumer and not an engineer, I cannot honestly say that any Intel product I owned — but of course, this Acer AMD64 machine is the first non-Intel product I have ever owned — sucked.
Except that one hears that they could have moved much faster from .5 GHz to 4 GHz, but chose to milk the drip, drip, drip approach to technical progress.
Now, Windows sucks, IMHO. But Lintel has made me a pretty happy camper.
So once again: What seems like a very decent product, to a layperson like me, married to a predatory marketing strategy that brings scorn, derision and outrage down upon the brand.
Why?
Well, I do have some gripes about my switch to 64, such as that the vendor of some commercial video-editing software that I bought now informs me that when it said its software ran on a 64-bit platform, it meant that its 32-bit version would run inside a 32-bit operating system that runs on a 64-bit platform.
Whereas I had a much different impression at the time I bought it.
So now I have to follow some very complex instructions for recompiling it, which turns out to be doable but a bit advanced for a hacker like me.
Lots of wasted time, cussing and gratuitous snarling at innocent cats out of frustration. But educational, in the end.
The New Market Machines 