“Windows Phone is Superior”

“Users: Own the disposable income. They don’t know what they hate. All they know is they buy phone service from mobile carriers and/or buy a phone from a carrier. They love speeds & feeds and will generally buy anything they are told to by television ads and RSPs (Retail Sales Professionals).

Charlie Kindel – cek.log

I’m sure this guy is really nice and i’ll try to say this as un-offensive as i can: Only a Microsoft trained engineer/manager could say something like this…

It’s this blindness to the consumer experience and perception and their relentless faith in the virtues and powers of marketing & advertising that got MSFT where it is now. I somehow imagine Steve Ballmer visualizing himself as Obi Wan Kenobi waving his hand and saying to the consumer: “Never mind these overpriced toys. This is the phone you want.” – while handing them a WP7 phone. Somehow, on his head, this makes perfect sense.

What MS, Steve B. and Charlie Kindel should realize: People talk. People communicate. People exchange histories. And above all, People aren’t mindless consuming drones. If you give them crap, they might buy them first. But they sure won’t be faithful customers, or recommend it, or even stick with it much longer than a single product.

Google is learning this the hard way. Android is everywhere and yet, no one, and i mean, no one is talking about it. I have had exactly zero, zero discussions with non-geek consumers about android. I’ve not even once overheard someone recommending it. All that i’ve heard is something like: “i’ve got one of those new touch only phones”. And that’s about it.

But you know what else i’ve heard? In the last 3 weekly family gatherings that i attended (with a ~50 person family), there was a significant part of the discussion time talking about Apple products, Apple vision of the product/consumer, Steve J. attention to details and Apple customer support. I didn’t start them or did anything else than occasionally agreeing in those discussions. And for the record, i’m the established family tech-geek/support, everyone else is an aggregated fair sampling of the non-geek consumer pool.

I think this speaks volumes… One brand, with exactly zero money in advertising in Portugal has more mindset and people talking about it than everyone else. Know why? Because their products aren’t crap and they don’t think the consumers “will buy anything they are told to by television ads and RSP”

Design at Microsoft

The full interview is really interesting and you can find it at The Verge.

Loved the subtle tips about coherence between hardware and software going to the font used on keyboards. Again, that is something that probably very few would even think about it but if used would definitely improve the user perception of a single, cohesive and user-friendly system.

On the down side, they had to wait to 2009 to share the color palettes and compare designs between internal Microsoft orgs?!

The question is, if they have designers of this quality, why haven’t they managed to change the crashing train before?…

MSN Messenger finally open

” Today we’re taking another step, with the public availability of access to the Messenger network via XMPP, an open standard. This means that anyone can build innovative messaging clients—either stand-alone or built into their devices—that include access to Messenger’s 300 million active users.”

Anyone can build a Messenger client—with open standards access via XMPP

Years later, Microsoft finally joins the standard protocol that everyone uses, allowing us users to finally use ichat to talk in the MSN network and probably improving the reversed engineered library that Adium and others use.

However, in typical Microsoft fashion, while they appear to join a standard they do it in a non-standard way… And now the login parts appears to use some OAuth magic (of which i’m not qualified to talk about) instead of the standard protocols than everyone else already uses.

So, no need to go running to your ichat program, Apple still needs to update it for using the standard protocol XMPP with MSN (which iChat already supports…)

Ah Microsoft. Somedays i have true faith in you. And then you go and just spoil it all again…