So it’s 2009. It’s also the day that MichaelMistretta.com turns one year old, which is kind of a big deal in this whole blogosphere thing.

Over the past year, I have met and worked with some truly fantastic people that have encouraged and challenged me, fallen in love with photography and photojournalism, started a company, and made a heck of a lot of mistakes along the way. Not bad for a year’s work.

I have changed. My weblog has changed. I am finally comfortable with my writing. I can finally re-read my writing over a hot beverage and genuinely enjoy it. That’s a feat in itself.

Looking ahead, I can’t pretend to predict everything that 2009 has in store for me. But I’m excited to meet more great people, do more great things, and continue to grow in everything I do.

Welcome to 2009. Let’s do this thing.

Ever since I can remember, I’ve had a fascination with words. More than just a collection of characters that come together to form sounds connected with preconceived meanings, but as a medium that can birth emotion, love, hatred, passion, anger, and excitement.

There’s a difference between simply thinking something is cool and being absolutely blown away by it. And I find that in our world of flashy animations and special FXs there’s a heck of a lot of coolness going around, and not enough blowing people away. Eloquently piecing the perfect words together to generate a desired reaction or feeling is simply too much work nowadays, and a quick “that’s cool” seems to be a happy compromise.

Don’t get me wrong—I’m all for using photographs and videos to tell a story (and I wouldn’t be an aspiring photographer if I wasn’t). I just admire those that can tell the same story with words that captivate me enough to make me forget I wasn’t actually there.

Joseph Rudyard Kipling said that “words are, of course, the most powerful drug used by mankind”, and I tend to agree with him. Because as much as I love writing words, I love reading them more.

And while words can stir me up wherever I may be, there is a metaphorical illustration that comes to mind of the ideal place to read for long periods of time.

Maybe it goes back to my childhood: spending the cold and howling winter night inside, sitting around a fire. I’d sit for hours in a navy-blue beanbag chair with a hot cocoa close at hand, reading book after book while acoustic music played softly in the background. In fact, it’s in that same atmosphere that I’m writing these words now: in the same beanbag chair around the same fireplace, albeit a slightly different taste in music.

While books still hold a special place in my heart, the majority of my reading these days is done through an RSS feed reader. No fireplace and no beanbag chair, just music and a toasty warm MacBook Pro…

And so, I longed to replicate my anecdotal reading paradise digitally. And I have done just that.

Part of the inspiration that sparked this post came from a question posed by Sam Brown last week, asking how you read your RSS feeds—through a feed reader or a browser?

Sifting through the comments, I was shocked to find that so many people treat their feed reader like their inbox—an overwhelming blob of information that they must constantly make a conscious effort to tend to and bring down to zero. Maybe it’s so foreign to me because I actually enjoy my RSS reading sessions and *gasp* look forward to them.

Your feed reader should not be like your inbox. You cannot pick and choose what will come into your inbox, and you can’t choose whether or not you want to reply to a particular message (unless, of course, you don’t mind making the other party upset and/or losing your job).

My feed reader isn’t like that. It’s mine—in the most selfish and sacred way possible.

Look at the upper right of your keyboard. You see that big “DELETE” button? Yeah, that’s your feed reader’s best friend. Anything that you don’t enjoy reading gets deleted. Anything that you find yourself dreading to read gets deleted. While we’re at it, anything that doesn’t utterly excite you should get put out with the trash as well. Make your feed reader into a sanctuary that you can retreat to engulf yourself in. It’s like the beanbag/fireplace analogy from before, but in a library. A big library. Of only the books that you absolutely love and never grow weary of reading.

Maybe you’ve forgotten the absolute euphoria of turning twitter off and read something mindblowingly brilliant, uninterrupted for 30 minutes straight. Or worse: maybe you’ve never experienced that firelit reading feeling before. The truth is, if you’re not eagerly anticipating opening your feed reader every night and enveloping yourself in words, you’re doing it wrong.

Just as a camera in the hands of a photographer can create heart-wrenching stories, words in the hands of a wordsmith can provoke, challenge, and inspire us in unimaginable ways.

If only we’d take the time to stop skimming.

I like passionate people.

I really don’t care what it is you’re passionate about—cars, computers, space, music, whatever. It’s not about what you’re passionate about, it’s about being passionate. It’s about discovering what makes you giggle and jump with glee, and making it what you do for a living.

When we’re young, the sky’s the limit. We can dream of being whatever it is that we can imagine. Astronaut? Oh yeah. Batman? You bet. But then we grow up and get caught in the rhetoric cycle of life, with people telling us what we can and can’t do and become. A sequence of events ends up finding most people in college, going with the flow, and not knowing what they want to do with their lives.

Doing things just for the sake of doing them doesn’t make much sense.

Our society is shaped around the “one-hit wonder” philosophy. Today, success is determined by how many CDs you sell in the first week, how much money you make in the boxing office the first weekend, and how fast you can get your startup bought by Google. It’s all about getting rich quick, and hey, if it doesn’t work out in the first couple months, declare it a failure and move on to something new.

Whatever happened to hard work? Whatever happened to working endlessly at something you believe in, even when everyone around you is declaring it impossible. We’ve been bombarded with stories of celebrities and those on top of the heap that have happened to get lucky, and we wish for the same. I like how Seth Godin describes the difference between luck and effort:

And that’s the key to the paradox of effort: While luck may be more appealing than effort, you don’t get to choose luck. Effort, on the other hand, is totally available, all the time.

So what keeps the very people that swore they would never work at a job they hated, from working for things they’re passionate about? Fear, disbelief, discomfort?

There are more people doing the things they love as hobbies rather than jobs. I have nothing against having hobbies, but it’s ironic that the things that people willingly put time and effort into are the things they do for pure satisfaction. For free. The money I’d pay for employees with that kind of drive…

When I look at the people that love what they do, I don’t see a man or woman that got there because of some degree or formal education. I don’t see someone that everyone believed in on day one. I see someone who was reckless enough to believe the impossible, and crazy enough to pursue it.

And that’s the sheer brilliance of passion.

It started one night in May with a simple thought.

“Why does everyone hate advertising?”

The actual principle of advertising is sound: provide a solution that allows the writer to generate revenue and give away their content for free while providing publicity for the advertiser. Essentially, advertising should allow you, the reader, to get better content.

Then, this little thing called “Flash” was developed.

And the advertisers said “Hey, everyone has this installed on their browsers, let’s make our ads flashy. And bouncy. And interactive”. Slowly, we became desensitized to the ads because a) they weren’t appealing to us, and b) treated us like we had the attention span of 2 year olds.

And then stuff like this happens.

We wanted to create something better—a solution that would benefit the writers, advertisers, and the readers. While there are some rare exceptions to traditional advertising, they are way out of the league of the average blogger and advertiser. We wanted to open up premium advertising to a whole new market of websites and advertisers.

Enter Fusion Ads.

The idea: take a bunch of websites with a similar audience, and bring them together to provide a way for advertisers to distribute their messages to a targeted audience. The end result: beautiful, relevant ads that don’t detract from the content on the site.

There are a couple conditions to these advertisements:

• Only a single ad will be shown per page.
• Ads will consist only of relevant products and services.

• There are a set number of ad spots per month, and each ad receives an equal slice of the network’s traffic over a given month.

• Animation is verboten.

To quote the Fusion website:

While this is contrary to the traditional wisdom of advertising — cramming as many ads as possible on a page — we believe that the value of Fusion’s ads are that they’re exclusive. With a single, unobtrusive ad shown on each page, sponsors don’t have to compete for attention among other advertisers, and readers don’t feel insulted by flashy banner ads.

If you are interested in purchasing an ad on the Fusion network, there are limited spots available for December and January.

Thanks

I want to take a quick moment to offer my sincere thanks to all those who made Fusion possible: from fledgling concept to completion. These are all wiser, smarter, and more talented people than myself that have pushed me along, and have helped fix some of the mistakes I made.

• Chris Bowler: helped me keep my sanity
• Shawn Blanc: told us when we were doing something wrong
• Cameron Hunt: came up with the exceptional design of the Fusion site
• Chris Thomson: mastermind behind the adserver

Also, thanks to all the bloggers and advertisers that chose to trust and partner with us for the very first month. I think we’ve truly come up with something great.

Dear esteemed readers,

While at Wordcamp a couple weeks ago, I was asked about what I write about on my blog. Good question. Something I often wonder myself. I proceeded to delay my response while I thought of some answer that would best communicate how I felt inside:

“Umm, well, some photography and technology news I guess, but not—”

“Ahhh, so it’s a personal blog?”

There was something about the way they said “personal” that was demeaning. As if no blog could possibly be worth reading if it’s personal. Looking around that room at the blank faces of “social media probloggers” trying to make a penny off a new medium, I could see that they missed it.

Write top ten lists with killer post titles. Spam your blog on every social network out there. Don’t be passionate, personal, or exhaustive. Make your posts easily skimable and don’t write about more than one topic. Build a community, entertain your readers, and make sure you submit to Digg. And for goodness sake, NEVER write a post over 500 words—the readers might get bored.

And then I get criticized because I don’t want to “embrace new media”.

Listen here: spamming people and treating your audience like mindless zombies is not “new media” or “social media”. It’s more like old media than anything else. The Internet doesn’t exist so we can constantly pamper the reader in a desperate attempt to plead with them to stick around. We don’t have to constantly push “punch the monkey” ads in the reader’s face, or tease them with juicy headlines and Digg bait. That’s what television is—reporters repeating the same rhetoric while teasing viewers with headlines and yelling them not to go away because, by golly, they’ll be right back.

You’re missing the point.

The Internet exists so that anyone with something to say can say it. And be heard. Everything has an audience—you just have to have something worth listening to. Unfortunately, we’ve over-saturated the world of “personal blogs” with stories of our girlfriend’s brother’s dog, diluting our message, and giving personal blogs a bad reputation as useless, mundane, and senseless.

I like how Jack Shedd puts it:

There are only three requirements I’ve ever sussed out from reading excellent sites. Write well, write often, and write with passion. It seems if you can manage that, you’ll find an audience.

Back to the question: “What do you write about on your blog?”

Such a simple question. What do I write about? Well, anything that I find interesting. It is MichaelMistretta.com after all, and if you’re not interested in what I’m interested in, why are you here in the first place?

But I want to go deeper than that. Something more.

Ideas.

That’s what I want to write about. Thoughts and ideas that inspire. Sure, there will still be photography and tech-related posts as those are still things I love. But my focus has changed. I guess you could say this blog has always reflected Michael Mistretta, and Michael Mistretta’s direction is changing.

This ‘change’ probably won’t affect you at all. My interests have stayed the same. But I’ve decided to publish this more for me than for you. Everything I’ve written up to this point has been a steady progression towards this decision.

Looking at some of the blogs that have inspired me over the last 10 months, I’ve also decided to change the way MM.com will be published.

• From John Gruber, I learned that it’s okay to have a linked list—and make it interesting at that.

• From Shawn Blanc, I discovered the novelty of publishing an exhaustive post, written masterfully down to the 5000th word, debunking the myth of readers only wanting short, scannable posts.

• And from Seth Godin, I found the value of consistently writing short, succinct posts that communicate a single idea in the most powerful way possible.

Anyone can grasp onto one of the three of these concepts, and claim it as their writing style. And that’s how I treated them for awhile—one being better than the other. If you were lazy, you posted a link. If you didn’t have much to say, you wrote a short post. And if you had a lot of time on your hands, you wrote an exhaustive post.

I couldn’t have been more wrong.

You see, none of these mediums are better than any of the others. They can all suck, and they can all be the greatest thing since sliced bread.

I used to think of a post topic and ask myself which type of post—short, long, or link—I felt like writing. No more. Now, when I think of an idea for a post I ask myself what the best way to communicate is.

If someone else said it better than I ever could, why waste time repeating them? Use a link. If you have an idea that doesn’t require a 4000 word post, by all means, don’t write the 4000 word post. It’s not a matter of one being better than another as much as it is one complimenting each other.

-

Again, to quote Jack Shedd:

If you’re worth reading, someone will read you. If you’re worth watching, someone will watch you. If you’re worth hearing, someone will listen.

And that’s exactly what I intend to do. Thank you for sticking with me throughout this ride. Things are about to get a whole lot better.

-Michael

I like to call it the Photoshop effect.

Today, everyone is a designer. Yep, a bunch of people have pirated Photoshop and have magically deemed themselves “designers”. And they’re determined to let the whole world know it. When I inquire about hiring a designer via twitter, everyone and their cat claims to be qualified simply because they have a copy of Photoshop.

The same problem can be said about blogging: I have a blog, therefore I’m a blogger; I have a digital camera, therefore I am a photographer; I have a twitter account, therefore I have friends.

Personally, I’m sick of it.

I have a fair bit of design sense. I own Pixelmator, and it does the job for me. But by no means do I call myself a designer. No, that’s someone else’s job. And so when I ask for a designer, I’m not looking for those with design tools, I’m looking for designers. Real designers. But often, the people that approach me have less design sense than I do.

We’ve become disillusioned, and have grown to think that by simply following a set of rules, we can become an artist. That if we preform a simple 1, 2, 3 process, we too can make something inspiring and wonderful.

That’s the problem. Creativity is not a math or a science. It’s not something with rules that you can break. It’s an art. It’s when a person has a story burning on the inside of them, and they use every medium available to tell that story.

Whither the Story?

Here’s my petition to every artist out there:

Stop it. Stop thinking about the tools. Stop taking pictures of things just because they’re there. Stop writing unoriginal content. With the amount of stuff out there on the Internet, your stuff better stand out among the overload of media being shoved down your audience’s throats.

But first, you have to have a story to tell.

The problem we’ve come up against are people have started to take art too seriously. A whole cottage industry has come up around digital photography and blogging and design—telling artists what they should and should not do to be successful. People making money off telling other people how they make money. And people actually believe this nonsense:

If I only follow these 53 and a half rules, then I will be successful. If I only had the money, then I could make it. If I only had the connections, the friends, the support, the equipment, the whatever… THEN I could create something beautiful.

Jack Shedd details the only requirements necessary for publishing a successful weblog, and I dare to say that they apply to every aspect of being an artist:

There are only three requirements I’ve ever sussed out from reading excellent sites. Write well, write often, and write with passion. It seems if you can manage that, you’ll find an audience.

It’s time for the true artists to begin breaking the rules again.

Real Artists Create

I’ve never been really good at art. I was taught that art was the thing you drew in sketchbooks, and because I never felt creative around sketchbooks, concluded I wasn’t an artist.

But there’s more to being an artist than that. So I’ve assembled my own definition:

A person who can communicate their imagination in a physical form, using whatever medium available to capture and portray their passions, thoughts, and emotions—reaching across language and culture barriers to connect to a viewer’s heart.

An artist is the master of their tools, and will use whatever tools necessary to tell the story he or she wants to tell. They know their equipment inside out—every knob, button, and switch—so their equipment simply become an extension of their mind, never getting in the way. They are free to focus on creating, and not on the tools themselves.

Artist are passionate and deeply attached to their work. Usually, true artists simply create for a hobby. Most artists give up creating things they love in exchange for a living. That said, the artists that are free to create things they love for a living are often the happiest. And most productive

Artists foster creativity. They are constantly thinking and meditating on how they can communicate a story. Because after all, artists are simply storytellers.

Better

When I take a photo; when I publish a blog post—when I create something—there’s a certain level of dissatisfaction. Not dissatisfaction in my work, but a dissatisfaction in my current state.

It’s hard to describe. It’s an insatiable desire to do things better. And better. In my mind, I see the metaphorical image of the perfect artist. And everything I create is one step closer. Be content with what you create, but never let that stop you from becoming better.

The key is growth. As an artist, you thrive on growth. You thrive on knowing that your latest creation is a little bit better than the creation before it. All you’re looking for is a sign—one new subscriber per month—that proves that you’re growing. That you have not hit your peak; that you still have room to grow.

An artist isn’t concerned with how good they may or may not be at the moment. They know that if they have a story worth telling and continue to grow it, one little bit at a time, they will create with more drive, more talent, and more passion than anyone else.

As a consumer, I love my iPhone. After the 2.1 update, I couldn’t be happier with my phone. Battery life, reception, dropped calls, bugs—they’ve all been fixed. Sure the occasional application crashes, but the same happens on my computer.

As a developer, the iPhone is a pain. Apple’s secrecy, restrictive NDA, and AppStore rejection policies make iPhone development nothing more than a game. A game with money. Lots of money.

Regardless, I was told that there was something better. Something open. Something that would be the iPhone’s platform “done right”. And for a moment, I believed it.

I woke up last Tuesday excited about Android and the T-Mobile G1. Finally, an open platform that anyone and everyone can develop for. No more closed environments. No more proprietary systems. Must be better, right?

Then I saw it.

The G1 represents everything that is wrong with open platforms. From the clunky brick-like hardware to the typefaces used in the interface to the Android Market, everything is oozing with it—a lack of attention to detail. Screenshots look like they come from completely separate devices, and represent an overall lack of polish. Still, some say, there is more to a phone than “pretty buttons” and “business support”.

Just how much am I supposed to give up to be ‘open’?

How Open is ‘Open’?

As much as everyone would like to believe that Google can create a completely open platform where anyone can do anything, they are bound by the same limitations as Apple and other cell manufacturers. T-Mobile, not unlike other cell carriers, restricts unlocking the G1 from their cell network, and prevents tethering it to a computer¹.

T-Mobile placed a 1GB cap on the G1, hardly adequate for a power-user, and would slow any additional 3G traffic to slower-than-EDGE speeds it users passed that cap. Since then, they have backed away from that statement claiming that they will only throttle bandwidth for “a small fraction” of “heavy-data users”. Whatever that means.

There’s also the fact that you can only sync contacts and calendars with your Google account. While this is a solid (free) competitor to MobileMe, it defeats the purpose of the phone being completely open.

AppStore Methodologies

People’s excitement over Android’s “open” philosophy is only escalated by the recent news of Apple rejecting apps that are too simple, too competitive, or just plain stupid. Google takes the opposite extreme, allowing anything into the Android Market. Developers can develop whatever-the-heck-they-want, and they are guaranteed admittance.

With no gatekeeper, comes no restrictions—both good and bad. The obvious downside to this is malware, spyware, and other malicious apps. It will be left up to the user’s desecration whether or not to download an app that may drain battery life or send your personal data back to some random server in China. On the flip side, developers have no restrictions for what they can or cannot develop. They are free to develop, compete, and innovate.

An open platform may have worked had there only been a single device. But Android is a multi-year project that will encompass a wide scope of devices with hundreds of varying user interfaces. Touchscreens to trackballs to keyboards to accelerometers. How can 50+ different phones made by different companies with different interfaces possibly function with apps in the Android Market?

Mark my word, three years from now, the Android Market will be a mess. Users will download—or even worse, purchase—an app, only to find that they have no way to interact with it because their phone lacks a touchscreen. Think there are a lot of flashlights and tip calculators in the AppStore now? Wait till you see the Android Market in 3 months.

Even if Google tries to restrict apps with certain capablities to certain devices, it will still be filled with a junky, inconsistent, and buggy mess. There is no one standard that all the apps in the Market have to adhere to. With everyone and their mother able to develop and publish apps, who will sift through them to make sure they are marked as “Touchscreen-only”? Sure, certain developers will be able to innovate and create apps worth buying, but from the initial screenshots of the Android Market, they will be hard to find—buried in more junk than a landfill on Boxing Day.

Some equate this “openness” argument to the OS X vs Windows argument today. Windows can be installed on any PC, which has lead to it owning 90% of the market today. While that argument has certain merit, it does not account for the fact that all PCs—including Macs—work the same way they have for the past 25 years. Every PC has a keyboard, a mouse, and a screen: and Windows looks pretty similar across them all.

Phones are very different though. There are different ways of interacting and working with applications. There are different UIs. There are different features. Imagine supporting thousands of people using your application across hundreds of different devices.

As cynical as it may sound, there is a certain beauty to closed platforms. Having a controlled environment ensures consistency and functionality, and provides a better experience for the end user. The AppStore offers many benefits to developers, but it is far from perfect. I think the ideal platform meets somewhere in the middle. Like it or not, gatekeepers have their place. But having a closed-system should not hinder the innovation of a platform—only raise the bar on the quality of applications developed.

People much smarter than me have already dissected this issue. Wil Shipley hits the nail on the head:

The App Store needs to think of itself as two different parts - it already implements these parts, but the people who run the store need to understand that these two parts are fundamentally separate:

• Part one is a giant warehouse, where every piece of software that is not actively harmful is kept in case someone wants to buy it (remember, users can always get a refund). This warehouse can be searched with titles and keywords or an item can be directly linked.

• Part two is like a traditional storefront, with limited real estate, so only the best or coolest applications are highlighted. It’s a recommendation engine, that highlights popular, highly-rated, or innovative applications.

Here’s to hoping that Apple will listen to developers and change the way they govern the AppStore.

G1, meet the iPhone

The iPhone was marketed as an iPod, a smartphone, and an internet communicator. Now, third-party applications can also be seen as a major selling point. With the lack of a 3.5mm headphone jack, dedicated video player, and desktop syncing, the G1 is hardly a media-centric device. It barely compares to the iPod. Surprising for Google, the G1 has a significantly laggy web-browser with a clumsy UI that leads to a lackluster mobile internet experience. That leaves the phone side of things, which I haven’t seen a single screenshot published to date.

That doesn’t mean that Google hasn’t thought through some of the major flaws of the iPhone and corrected them in Android. The G1’s notification bar involves a single swipe from the top of any window, and is miles ahead of the “popup” notifications on the iPhone. One-time login into your Google account looks simple and straight forward, and the home screen is much more customizable than the iPhone.

But there are many more substantial flaws within the user interface. Fonts seems as if they were randomly picked on a per-application basis, and consistency is non-exsistant. In fact, looking at screenshots from the G1 user manual often reflect the UI of what should be multiple devices. But really, the problem lies with the lack of attention to detail Google has. Great engineers, but very poor designers.

Take for example the physical keyboard (the only physical feature besides the 3.2MP camera that bests the iPhone). Imagine working in a vertical-oriented app, and being prompted to enter a password. The user must rotate the device horizontally, slide up the keyboard, type in the password, slide down the keyboard, and rotate the phone back to the vertical orientation. Compare this with the iPhone, where the (albeit virtual) keyboard slides up right when you need it, and disappears when you don’t.

All this is above and beyond the clunky hardware, that looks as if it was inspired from the Amazon Kindle. One Google engineer points out that throughout the whole three-year development process, the design has remained exactly the same. With a 3-year old design, how can you compete with something like the iPhone?

My question is not whether “openness” in and of itself is good—but whether it can be a major selling feature to a device that offers an inferior user experience. The iPhone and the G1 are quite comparable in price—$179 and $199 respectively (although the G1 requires an extra micro-SD card to expand it’s measly 1GB of storage). For the same price, are consumers going to chose the G1 simply because it’s open?

My feelings about Android are very similar to John’s: it’s a platform that I had high hopes for, but very low expectations. If Google had offered a phone of this caliber for free, with occasional location-based “notification ads” informing me that I was 2 minutes away from Domino’s Pizza, and if I went in the next 20 minutes could save 20% off my order, I think this phone would be a huge success.

Sergey Brin said it: this phone is for geeks. The tinkering crowd. The ones that like to tear apart their gadgets from top to bottom and be in complete control. And for those geeks, this is the phone they’ve been waiting for. For the rest of us? I’m not so sure.

It’s too early to judge the success of the platform as a whole. There are many Android phones that will be released on a variety of carriers come 2009. While there’s no doubt Android is far ahead of other phone operating systems like Windows Mobile—and will be for quite awhile, by the looks of it—it seems to miss the mark on the reason I own an iPhone.

I don’t own an iPhone for it’s features. It’s quite pathetic to own a smartphone that can’t copy and paste or record video. I don’t own an iPhone to be open. I don’t own an iPhone to tinker and play with. I own an iPhone because I can wake up every morning and actually enjoy using my phone. The consistency—the experience—is something that other manufacturers (including Google) don’t get. And I’m not sure that an open platform of any kind can ever achieve the attention to detail and experience that Apple has given to the iPhone.

Daniel Jalkut’s take on Microsoft’s $300 million ‘Bill and Jerry’ advertising campaign -

Imagine yourself in Microsoft’s position. you’ve got some 90% of the market share for computer operating systems, and you’re facing increasingly negative reports about the public’s impression of your place in the world. You’re a cold, hard company. You’re not very much fun. You don’t care about innovation. You’re a sleeper in a dancer’s universe. You’ve got no soul. You’re a plain old, boring, damn it all ridiculous stick in the mud. Microsoft, you suck.

If you’re Microsoft, and you’ve grown tired of these assessments, you wouldn’t have to be a rocket scientist to realize that owning 90% of the market and having a bajillion dollars … is a pretty good place to start from, in turning around your public image.

The overall consensus around the Internet seems to be that the ads are ridiculous: having a seemingly senseless plot and a hint of wry humor. Daniel Jalkut takes the opposite stance saying that the Microsoft ads are “genius”. They defy the traditional methodologies of advertising by attempting to shift the public view of the company to something more modern.

Apple and Microsoft are two very different companies with different approaches towards advertising. Part of the reason behind the popular ‘Get a Mac’ ads was to turn the public perception regarding Macs, and dispel common Mac myths—which I think it’s safe to say succeeded. Over time, however, Apple decided to play off the negative reaction to Vista to in turn, sell more Macs.

Microsoft is in a much different situation. They own 90% of the PC market. They don’t have to sell anything to consumers. They just have to stop users from feeling inadequate with what they have, and eyeing the viable alternatives. All they have to do is change Microsoft’s impression from a old, boring company to whatever-they-want-Microsoft-to-look like. And they have that vision. I commend that.

But their implementation? No matter how many ‘geniuses’ there are at Microsoft, it seems that everything gets messed up in their implementations. They’ve created a five minute advertisement about nothing. I watch it, and can’t help but feel confused and queasy. Five minutes of my life I will never get back.

Not putting Vista in their ads is probably the best decision Microsoft’s actually made. Ads don’t need to be about a certain product to be successful. To take the obvious example, look at the Think Different ads of old. Those ads were a last attempt by a dying company to return to it’s roots and change the way the world viewed them. And it worked.

Think Different vs. Bill And Jerry

People are comparing Microsoft’s new ads to Apple’s Get a Mac campaign, which is the wrong comparison to draw. Microsoft’s campaign is much more reminiscent of the Think Different ads.

Both campaigns refrain from mentioning any specific product. Both campaigns are a last ditch effort to turn the company around in the public eye. But that’s where the similarities end. The Think Different ad hovers at a minute in length, while the latest Microsoft ad clocks in at an astounding 4 minutes and 30 seconds. It’s more of a movie trailer than an ad at this point.

Think Different has no humor, no special effects, even no colour—just good writing, whereas the Bill and Jerry ads are accompanied with the typical Seinfeld jokes and Gates’ quirkiness. Most importantly though, the Think Different ad has a message.

That’s right. Even if you want to do an ad campaign that goes against the typical “buy me cause I’m better” approach, you still need to have a message. You still need to have something to say. Something that gives me satisfaction when I reach the end. I hate listening to people who have nothing to say ramble on—especially for five minutes at a time.

But that is the taste left in my mouth after a Microsoft ad. I don’t feel inspired, excited, enthused, or satisfied. I feel like I’ve just watched a movie that was a couple hours too long, and didn’t really have a story. That’s not exactly the kind of message I’d want to be sending my customers.

Microsoft has proved that if you take away all the products and bugs and reviews and users, there is nothing underneath. No substance. No innovation. No passion that drives them. They are just a company past it’s prime, paying an actor past his prime to make an ad. Period.