What happened to Vista?
Case and Point – the “Mojave Experiment”
Windows Vista is a good example of a reasonably decent product with a ton of potential — that went terribly wrong. Where did it go wrong? Well, I don’t think it was the marketing, to be honest. I think it was Microsoft’s push to get it launched without further delay (as I recall, it had already been delayed six months or so). They got greedy.
Unfortunately, what happened was that corporate clients ran into mountains of compatibility issues with custom written software, and lost a ton of cash. In other words – it pissed a lot of techies off. These techies whined to their managers and coworkers, to their friends and family, and of course, to the(ir) Internet. And the laymen listened, and they told their managers and coworkers, friends and family, and … well, maybe they wrote about it on their MSN spaces or whatever, but nobody reads those anyway so I suppose that didn’t affect anything.
Anyhow, the point that I’m trying to get at, is that while Vista had a ton of pretty user features, and may (now) better address compatibility issues, it’s probably too late. Microsoft has lost market share to Apple, and anyone who didn’t want to spend twice or three times the cash for a “tangerine” coloured computer, is content to stay with Windows XP. When a company has to resort to case studies to market its product, it’s a sure sign that something major has gone wrong somewhere along the way. People don’t want case studies; they want what everyone else wants.
Apple on the other hand, seems to have this down pat. Take the trendily named and designed iPod for example. When they came out, everyone wanted them. The want was irrational – there were better mp3 players on the market at the time, that actually cost much less. What’s even more amazing about the iPod was its aid in the successful marketing of iTunes; convincing people to pay money for mp3s at a time when people could hop on Kazaa Lite or whatever and download just about any mp3 under the sun (not that you still can’t, and of course there’s bit torrent, but it’s not the “golden days” of p2p). Soon, everyone was buying iPods, and that moved onto iMacs, iBooks, iTouches, and even such monumentally stupid shit as the iFish. As you know, all of this faggotry finally came to a climax with the iPhone, the expensive phone that every trendy person MUST HAVE.
The moral of the story? Be trendy. Sell the name of your product and not the product itself. Sheeple will follow. Oh – and don’t piss off techies.
