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How much trou­ble is Vista actu­ally in?

Just lately it seems to be one thing after another. First there were the sto­ries of peo­ple “upgrad­ing” Vista to XP. The the whole Vista-ready deba­cle and the result­ing class-action law­suit. And now we have panic set­ting in over the end-of-life of XP.

To get around the end-of-life prob­lem accord­ing to a report on Silicon.com, Dell and HP are prepar­ing to use the down­grade rights that come with Vista to carry on sup­ply­ing XP pre­loaded on new machines. If this receives sig­nif­i­cant take-up it could be a real blow to Microsoft – new machines are the main route to upgrade for the vast major­ity of users and the one that will deliver the best Vista expe­ri­ence.

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Some microsites are lit­tle pieces of joy. Some are func­tional ‘more info’ affairs. Then there are those that turn you from being pos­i­tive and excited to being frus­trated and annoyed.

Nam­ing no names, but take the Canon 450D site. Now, to declare my alle­giances, I own a Canon 300D (in fact it is my fourth Canon) plus a bunch of lenses and I am begin­ning to think about upgrad­ing. As such, I’m pretty excited about the brand spank­ing new 450D.

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You know how it is, some­times when you’re try­ing to come up with ideas you get stuck. Just plain old-fashioned stuck. Every­thing you think of comes back to the same worth­less thought you had an hour ago. You can see only one route to a solu­tion and frankly it’s head­ing nowhere. And, of course, the dead­line isn’t get­ting any fur­ther away.

While I cover a cou­ple of ways out in Cracked, there’s a really use­ful one that wouldn’t fit in: oblique strate­gies. Orig­i­nally oblique strate­gies was a card deck cre­ated by Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt to help jog the mind when the fog of work pres­sure descended (details here).

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Don’t say I never give you anything.

You can now down­load your free, gratis, for-absolutely-no-money copy of Cracked: a small guide to big ideas. Orig­i­nally cre­ated as a printed book for inter­nal and client use, Cracked is a guide to cre­ative prob­lem solv­ing. In it I cover some ways to approach mar­ket­ing prob­lems, a bit on audi­ences and then a bunch of cre­ative tips, tricks and tech­niques. I’ve refor­mat­ted it for screen and it weighs in at 472Kb.

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Viral mar­ket­ing is often pre­sented as the Holy Grail of mar­ket­ing. The story goes some­thing like this: cre­ate a clever/funny low-budget video, whack it up on YouTube and watch the hits roll in as peo­ple send the link to friends who them­selves for­ward it on in turn. The num­bers are cer­tainly seduc­tive, YouTube’s all time most viewed video has to date racked up over 82m views.

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Over the years I’ve man­aged to hold a range of con­tra­dic­tory views about cre­ative awards. My cur­rent default stance is to be firmly against them but then every now and again, there’s a piece of work that I feel deserves wider recog­ni­tion and a nice tro­phy on a small plinth seems as good a way of achiev­ing this as any.

The plus-side of the awards argu­ment goes some­thing like this: Awards set a bench­mark of cre­ative excel­lence. They help agen­cies recruit new, tal­ented peo­ple and raise morale inter­nally. And they give prospec­tive clients the reas­sur­ance that they’re buy­ing into a qual­ity agency.

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