In the Year 2552, Jetpacks are Commonplace

And they fly for all of 10 seconds. And they're still noisy as fuck.

Tim Nudd over at AdFreak points out that the Tuesday launch of Halo:Reach included a stunt in London's Trafalgar Square involving a jetpack.



Surprise! It's the same, lame jetpack that stunters have been using since the 1946 SuperBowl. Yawn. Nice job, Microsoft/Xbox. You have executed a worn-out stunt in promotion of your new game. And all the traditional media people you invited went, "Wooooo!" [clap-clap-clap]

What? SuperBowl wasn't around in 1946? Oh. Sorry. But that jetpack was. This shtick is old, it's lame, and it doesn't answer the question this blog's title asks. (Or, for that matter, the question asked by this blog's music video. Or this blog's theme song.)

Rent your next loud, brief jetpack stunt from this dude. Invite drunken journalists. They will be in awe.

Stinging Bing

I'd read nothing but positive reviews for Bing, so I decided to conduct a little test of the Microsoft search engine. A self-serving test, but a test nonetheless.

Yesterday I wrote a post called Swiss Army Airstream. I typed that phrase, without quotes, into Google. The post I wrote yesterday is the third search result for the phrase. Type the same phrase into Bing, and I stopped trying to find my post after ten pages of search results.

Now, I understand that Google might be indexing my blog faster than Bing since Where's My Jetpack? is hosted on Google's Blogger platform, and I also get that Bing might want to take their time indexing Google hosted results, much the way Microsoft's spellcheckers pretended not to know what the word "Google" was for the longest time. This isn't unbiased science, but I have proven, at least for myself, that there's no need to switch from a good thing to a questionable thing.

Casting Beans at Grandmas and Other Stuff

I had the opportunity to join Bob Knorpp, John Wall and Bill Green for a serious discussion of marketing news last night on the Beancast. These guys take their marketing seriously, and Bob provided a required reading list that amounted to some 10,000 pages, all of which I devoured half an hour before the show in a futile attempt to act like I knew what I was talking about.

Had never met Bob or John, but it was great to finally put voices to the words they write daily. I have been "collaborating" with Bill for at least three years, and it was nice to actually get to speak with him. I'm fairly certain I contributed little of much use to the conversation, but it was good to be in the company of people who are all over social media trends, agency news and the eternal battle of Apple vs. Microsoft. At times I felt like the shade tree mechanic visiting with a group of top Porsche engineers in a glass and chrome complex in Stuttgart.

I stand by my comment that if you regard Facebook as "indispensable" to your life, then you need to get a life.

Just Over Half Equals "Almost"

One of my email accounts on a Microsoft Exchange server is getting all paranoid on me, sending me this message every day.


"Delete any items you don't need from your mailbox and empty your Deleted Items folder."

Since it took me five months to get to this point, I might wait a little bit, like until I can barely see any white left in that bar.

Stop It, Already

See here? You can do the shiny logo reflection in MS Word now. That means it's way played. So you can stop doing it on all of your logo designs and websites. Please.

I Should Update the Microsoft Spellchecker

And simply click "add" so that this word doesn't get the red squiggly underline anymore. But I don't as a reminder that Google and Microsoft are mortal enemies, and that Microsoft purposely did not include the word "Google" in their dictionary because they hate them that much. Maybe subsequent versions gave in, but I'm sure the hate is still just as real.

Resistance is futile, Ballmer.

And speaking of rivalries and things Microsoft hates, I used to be a die-hard PC guy, not willing to go along with the cultists who love their Macs so much that they have little Apple stickers on their cars, but as my gig at CubeWorld^TM comes to an end next week, I realize how much I will miss my Mac. Mac is just way better, less prone to failure and far more intuitive. If I were working on the Mac campaign, my suggested tagline would be "Way better." But really, I will miss my Mac mostly for the Apple+shift+4 selective screen grab feature, which makes things like grabbing the above image so much easier, making blogging from work that much stealthier.

Blogging In CubeWorld™

New OS installed overnight. Everything shiny and new. Firefox not a priority to the Web Blocking Police of IT. Blog window of opportunity may shut at any moment. If I lose contact, send MREs, cigarettes and whiskey. Jetpacks out.

Is Yoohoo Really Worth $44 Billion?

Does anyone even drink this stuff anymore?

What?

Yahoo?

Oh.

Well, does anyone even use that search engine anymore?

Maybe We Should Use a Bitten Apple Intsead

I use a Mac at work. Other than the insane collection of fonts, I don't see the superiority. This is not an invitation for Mac Cultists to deride my PC preference or claim that Bill Gates is the Antichrist. Clearly, your magician in black has had sinister plans from the start. Note the early logo: Isaac Newton sitting under an apple tree.
Via

Redmond Sticks it to Mountain View

With Halo 3 in beta, X-Box's sure-to-go-platinum 3rd installment of the wildly popular game, Microsoft is taking advantage of a free ad medium that the gamers know and use extensively: YouTube. Nearly 4 million views of the various Halo 3 trailers, with thousands of comments.











If you can't beat 'em, at least you can piggyback on their success until they find a way to charge you for it.

Vista is Spanish for View

Years ago in days of old, when Magic filled the air*, radio and television were dominated by single-sponsor programs. They had variety shows or serials that were "brought to you by" Maxwell House coffee or Chesterfield cigarettes. The shows' hosts and actors became shameless shills as they broke character to smoke a Chesterfield on camera or loudly slurp a cup of coffee over the airwaves, marveling at the rich, smooth taste of both.

Those days are back, minus the out and out shamelessless of those old endeavors.

It's a good advertising model, as anyone who watched Demetri Martin's show on Comedy Central last night can attest. You feel like you're getting a special on HBO or Showtime, except for the amusing if perplexing interruptions for clearification.com and the Institute for Advanced Personhood at ipa.org. Both are creations of Mekanism of San Francisco and McCann Erickson as they rolled out Windows Vista last night in a new/old way. The association with Vista became more apparent as the one-hour special moved along, but the slow reveal, as it were, made you appreciate both the concept, and the departure from the usual seven spots blaring at you in three and a half minutes.

The idea is, of course, Buzz. More importantly, blogger buzz and MySpace buzz and Web 2.0 buzz and viral buzz and social networking buzz. Buzz, buzz, buzz. And compared to the Steve Jobs Wizard in Black Turtleneck on Stage Before Drooling Fans Unveiling the New Product model, I'd take this one. Much more daring and risky.

Following Demetri Martin came the Daily Show with Jon Stewart, where the "detached pitchman" model was abandoned for what amounted to a hostile takeover by Microsoft of the last half of the show. Not only did the Bill Gates interview last a full fifteen minutes, but commercial bumps in and out were devoid of the mainstay Daily Show rocking theme, favoring a gentle soundtrack accompanied by the Vista logo animating over the Daily Show logo. When Bill comes back and is talking to Stewart, the Windows Vista signage and paraphernalia are everywhere, making you feel like you're at a trade show. Softball questions, little information, with basically a "come and see" pitch from the Billman, Stewart gamely playing along.

After the Colbert Report, it was an "encore presentation" of the Martin special. Martin, a veteran of The Daily Show, is a mix of Stephen Wright and CarrotTop, with a little vintage Steve Martin musicianship. The Martin Model is refreshing, as even the clearification.com site makes no mention of Vista. You can tell they're related, but he's not shoving it in our faces.

Not sure what Microsoft paid for total domination of a network last night, but it's an interesting (if old) idea that we will likely be seeing more of.

Did I fall into their sinister marketing trap by blogging about it? I guess I did. But it took me years to finally fork over the money for a legit copy of XP Pro. I'm not buying Vista anytime soon. I might "come and see" what the hype is about, but I'll likely wait about 4 years, after all the hacks have been fixed and the holes plugged.

And I had my suspicions comfirmed last night that Jon Stewart's writers steal material from this and other ramblings of mine. In the interview with Gates, Stewart asked, "So, when do we get our jetpacks?" But that's what social media is all about, I guess.

*Bonus points for this homage.