The week in your words: Microsoft cans laughter

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Posted on 19 Sep 2008 at 15:50

In a week that saw Microsoft wipe its hands of $10 million worth of Jerry Seinfeld, ZoneAlarm's creators warn people off ZoneAlarm, and an Australian woman discover her mobile was more touch than screen, we take a look back to see what our readers have made of it all.

Microsoft to can Seinfeld ads?

Microsoft has its wish. Its Vista adverts received the sort of critical panning that would have made even master-of-the-mediocre Uwe Boll cry, but they've finally made somebody laugh. And that man is Jerry Seinfeld, who picked up a quite incredible $10 million for appearing in two measly adverts. It's enough to make Premiership footballers hit the breadline, but according to Microsoft their decision had nothing to do with public perception, oh no, it was always the plan. Yeah, right.

"Nice try Microsoft, but I'm not buying it," says brumsta. "I'll bet their plan to 'drop him' refers to the end of his contract when Windows was seen as all soft and cuddly. No chance they planned to pay him $10 million for two meaningless adverts."

Indeed not. We're sure they intended to pay him for at least 10 meaningless adverts, but needs must...

noghar was equally sceptical: "It's typical of Microsoft to lose their bottle like this. Any company with a stronger nerve and a clearer sense of its brand would have worked out the marketing campaign path and stuck with it till either the public caught on or they could drop it without looking panicked like they do now."

To be fair, if any company can be accused of relentlessly flogging a dead horse without the merest hint of sympathy its the Vista creators. Dread_zeppelin doesn't think it's going to make any difference anyway.

"Advertising Windows is bit like advertising milk, or tap water. There are alternatives, just like milk and tap water, but the majority of the population either, a)don't care or b)don't know (won't/can't know) or who know and wouldn't start using Vista even if they did see a clever advert.

But, the laudable part of these adverts is at least they are not trying to deceive the gullible/stupid with a batch of lies (on this occasion)."

We're not sure about that. After all, are any of these people actually PCs? We think not.

ZoneAlarm users warned off latest upgrade

It comes to something when manufacturers bypass reviews and tell people not to use their products themselves. In this case it was Check Point shooing people away from the latest upgrade of ZoneAlarm, which is gaining something of a reputation for causing... erm... havoc on the machine it's installed on.

"I've finally completely removed ZA from my machine as the performance was getting worse and worse," reports Zone Alarm survivor qpw3141. "It eventually reached the point where I couldn't play music because something was causing the kernel to hog the CPU. On removing ZA that and several other problems disappeared."

halsteadk was a fellow firewall front-line veteran: "I tried installing ZA on my parents' laptop last weekend. Well, it seemed to go a bit over the top in keeping virtually the entire internet out of the PC. Windows Updates were a particular nightmare and the only solutions were to add all the possible sites as "Trusted" or remove it altogether - I did the latter."