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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 débâcle 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.

Of course it is almost incon­ceiv­able that Vista will fail. Win­dows as a whole still tops 90% mar­ket share and within that Vista racks up just over 14%, dwarf­ing OSX and Linux. It could be simply a case of allow­ing users to stall for time until Vista’s prob­lems are ironed out. But with with the next ver­sion of Win­dows slated for a 2010 release (that’s if it comes out on time – a big if based on the exper­i­ence of Vista/Longhorn) it is con­ceiv­able that people may leapfrog Vista and go straight from XP to Win7. And with the sug­ges­tion that Microsoft may delay the XP end-of-life date, this may become a very real possibility.

Of course, although bad, this would not be the worst pos­sible out­come for Microsoft. That scen­ario is one where there is a whole­sale shift to Linux allow­ing users to aban­don paid-for licensed soft­ware for good. This last week has seen the release of the latest ver­sion of Ubuntu which is estim­ated to already have over 8 mil­lion users and offers the most Windows-like user-friendliness of the Linux fla­vours. Even Apple has been post­ing impress­ive sales res­ults for its PCs – 51% more that the same quarter last year and an increase run­ning at some five times the industry aver­age. And, should we get to a ubi­quit­ous web model where all that users need is a browser then all bets are off.

But back to today. Yes Vista is in trouble but I can’t see this as the tip­ping point for a whole­sale migra­tion away from Win­dows per se – not yet any­way. Per­son­ally, I think Microsoft would be mad not to extend XP’s life – no user wants to be forced into an upgrade (espe­cially one that is receiv­ing so much neg­at­ive pub­li­city), it will simply rein­force the view of Microsoft as an unhealthy monopoly.

In the mean­time, to cel­eb­rate the release of Vista SP1 there’s this little gem which, depend­ing who you believe is either ‘ironic’ or ‘mor­onic’ – you decide:

The les­son here: never, ever do a cor­por­ate song.

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.

So today I got sent the reg­u­lar You Con­nect email which con­tained an invit­a­tion to go to the Let’s Play site and take a look at the 450D. Per­fect for a Fri­day after­noon I thought and off I went.

The site opens with the oblig­at­ory pre­loader count­ing up. But on my Mac it coun­ted one num­ber per second (without say­ing what it was count­ing up to ). I tried a dif­fer­ent browser, same thing. Then I tried a PC which sat blank screened for ages before finally count­ing up at a reas­on­able speed.

Lesson 1: give your audi­ence a clear idea of how much longer they are going to have to wait so they can decide whether they should bother.

Then we get to a choice of whether to ‘play’ in the city with an urban-looking woman or the moun­tains with a fleeced up guy. Hover over the nav and the two mod­els change places, the one at the back going nicely out of focus. Now, while this is pretty, if this was the reason for the pre­load time it really wasn’t worth it.

Les­son 2: remem­ber your vis­it­ors come to the site for a reason, don’t let the eye-candy get in their way.

I clicked ‘city’ and was intro­duced to a nav device that prom­ised that I could pan round an image and the click a hot­spot to zoom in and dis­cover more. I was also intro­duced to another pre­loader (a pro­gress bar this time). And I waited again. Finally, it opened the image with the urban model poised to take the shot. As I moved my cursor the the edges it allowed me to pan around the image. There was one hot­spot. Just one. No choice, no real inter­ac­tion. I star­ted to won­der why Canon didn’t simply run a fully pre­loaded anim­a­tion or a video or any­thing but this.

Les­son 3: if you are going to offer the audi­ence choice, make sure there is some ele­ment of actual choice involved.

So I clicked the hot­spot and, in the pro­cess, activ­ated the third pre­loader of the exper­i­ence, this time a spin­ning wheel of dots (at least there is vari­ety while you wait). This (after a while) activ­ated another anim­a­tion that placed the viewer inside the head of urban woman as she moved in for the shot. She shoots, she scores and you are then presen­ted with a new screen and a stack of pho­tos that allow you to flick through the camera’s fea­tures – all illu­sion of the ori­ginal idea now (thank­fully) gone. Of course what you are left with is the most stand­ard of micros­ites (and not a par­tic­u­larly inter­est­ing one at that).

Now don’t get me wrong, hav­ing an immers­ive micros­ite exper­i­ence can be a really lovely thing. And it cer­tainly suits the Canon pho­to­graphy brand (and actu­ally, Canon did a much bet­ter job on the earlier 400D site). But this was just pain­ful (and would have been even if it worked faster). As with doc­tors, the first rule of mar­ket­ing must be “do no harm” – a rule this site could do with heeding.

I still love Canon cam­eras, but I’ll think twice before respond­ing to their mar­ket­ing again.

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).

It con­sists of over 100 cards (or as the deck terms it “Over one hun­dred worth­while dilem­mas”) and the idea is that when you get stuck you pick a card at ran­dom and con­sider your prob­lem in light of what it says. And they are oblique. So flip­ping my own deck at ran­dom gives me, “Go to an extreme, come part way back.” Now of course, if you are stuck that might be just the help you are look­ing for. What is the extreme con­sequences of the prob­lem? What would be an extreme solu­tion? How far back would we need to come to cre­ate a work­able answer? Work that train of thought until it goes no fur­ther and then select another card.

While there are a few such cre­ativ­ity decks around, for me oblique strategies works because it doesn’t try to solve the prob­lem for you. It still gives you room to think. And it can take you off in unex­pec­ted and use­ful directions.

You can still buy the phys­ical deck (it comes in a lovely under­stated black box) and costs £30. But you can also down­load it free as a wid­get for Mac, PC and Linux.

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.

I’ve licensed Cracked under Cre­at­ive Com­mons which basic­ally means that you can do what you like with it as long as you credit me as the ori­ginal author and offer the same rights to any­one you pass it (or deriv­at­ive work) on to. Click the license badge on the front cover for full details.

Take a look, see what you think. There’s a click­able email link on the last page where you can get in touch and let me know your thoughts. And, of course, if you want to see any of this stuff put into prac­tice, you know where to come. Enjoy.

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.

Of course, most of these are either unin­ten­tion­ally viral or music videos. Once we’re into com­mer­cial efforts, the num­bers drop sig­ni­fic­antly (but are still pretty high). Take the excel­lent Will it Blend? series. The top viewed video – blend­ing an iPod – has had over 5m views. Most efforts, how­ever, score in the thou­sands rather than mil­lions. And many more pro­duce efforts that have noth­ing what­so­ever to do with either their product or brand.

In many ways, it’s a shame that viral has come to mean video (or at a stretch, video + games). This has con­strained the think­ing of many com­pan­ies, restrict­ing their options and harm­ing their results.

The latest crop of Change This mani­fes­tos could help. It includes the won­der­fully named, Word of mouse by David Meer­man Scott. While in some ways it presents noth­ing stag­ger­ingly new, it does give a good over­view of viral that goes bey­ond You­Tube to encom­pass ebooks, “secret” micros­ites and branded util­it­ies (plus the oblig­at­ory bit on video as well). It’s well worth a read.

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.

But…

The thing about awards for me (and I’ve judged on a few) is that the work that wins awards tends to be the kind of work that wins awards. By this I mean it tends to fol­low a cer­tain advert­ising mind­set. It has a self-referential clev­erness about it that appeals to people in the busi­ness. A few years back, I was on an awards panel and we were get­ting down to the choice of the actual win­ner. The debate, rather than being about cre­ativ­ity or innov­a­tion or effect­ive­ness, centred around whether the piece was a [insert award name] type of piece and the pos­sible reac­tion of the audi­ence at the cere­mony. This really can’t be healthy.

Also, awards tend to pigeo­hole work into cat­egor­ies. But today, the most inter­est­ing work sits out­side tra­di­tional cat­egor­ies. It’s the mixed up, mashed up stuff that’s push­ing things for­ward. The catch-all of ‘integ­rated’ doesn’t really cover it – espe­cially as for many awards this comes down to “and here’s a couple of other things we tagged on to our ad cam­paign.” And let’s not even get star­ted on the cost.

So I tend to agree with Bruce Mau in his Incom­plete Mani­festo for Growth:

Don’t enter awards com­pet­i­tions. Just don’t. It’s not good for you.

But then again, some­times, on a weak day, what I wouldn’t give for a One Show or Epica.