Posts Tagged Microsoft
I’m Emailing for the Greater Good
written 1 Oct 2008 over a light lunch
Everyone gets them, most of us hate them, and who the hell is forwarding them anyway? The paintings of animals on someone’s hand or those chalk drawings that one guy does that looked cool, the first fifty times. Forwarding emails costs American businesses $8 trillion every half-second and that doesn’t even include the time wasted waiting for all of those pictures to load up on your company’s DSL connection.
So today when I saw this image at the bottom of a forward menacing my inbox, which read “i’m emailing for the greater good” I started laughing both cheeks of my buttocks off. I was instantly reminded of those forwards that tell you to tell 10 other people or Jesus will lose the battle with Satan, or the countless Internet petitions that I’ve signed with the glimmer of hope that I really will end the war in Iraq and send a monkey’s trainer to Mars.
I just had to click on it to see what the situation was. And I must say, I was quite surprised.
i’m MAKING A DIFFERENCE is a website sponsored by Microsoft. It’s a ploy, of course, to get people to use Windows Live and Messenger more often, but it does seem to come with a benefit: every time someone who’s registered with the service uses Live or Messenger, Microsoft donates some cash to their partner causes (such as the Red Cross, National AIDS Fund, Sierra Club, StopGlobalWarming.org, MS, Unicef, National Humane Society, and more). So you can literally help fight everything from breast cancer to puppies just by using Microsoft services.
Of course, no one actually uses any of Microsoft’s web services, but…
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The Thing About Microsoft is…
Microsoft just recently admitted making mistakes when Vista was released, stating that “We broke a lot of things.” and “There’s a conversation going on in the marketplace today and it’s just plain awful.”
We broke a lot of things.
The conversation referred to is presumably the one where word of mouth is spreading Vista’s incompatibility with many devices and the general feeling of the new OS being a step back from XP. It might also include the conversation where many users, as much as 40% of current college students, are deciding that rather than upgrading to Vista ($130 – $220 depending on the version) they’re going to shell out for a new Mac (who’s computers are now only about $500 more expensive and who’s OS upgrades are only around $80.) Apple’s market share (for Macs) is up to almost 8% (from less than 1% in the late 90′s). Corporations (especially in China) are switching to Linux more and more often. Firefox has as much as 41% of the browser market, which just a few years ago was all but completely dominated by Internet Explorer.
So what happened, and what’s going to happen?
