Office and Vista. Free while they last.
OK kids, here’s the deal: watch three webcasts about what’s new from Microsoft, and you can get a full, licensed copy of Windows or Vista for free. Really. It’s like those timeshare-condo sales pitches my Mom always wants to go sit through in order to get a free lunch or something — just suffer the sales pitch, and there’s a reward at the end. It’s all explained at PowerTogether.com.
And even if you have no intention of doing that, you might want to watch this.
This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 29th, 2006 at 4:52 pm. You can subscribe to comments on this post through its RSS feed.
on November 29, 2006 at 5:00 pm Mr. Bruce wrote:
will it run on my functional but antique Pentium III? …it has oodles of memory.
on November 29, 2006 at 6:55 pm Doug wrote:
Bruce, I think that might be an exercise in frustration, unfortunately. The new user interface requires a bit more horsepower to really be smooth. The official answer is that it will work, but I think you’d hate yourself in the morning.
Robin, sounds like Mr. Bruce needs a hot new home computer for Christmas! (Ms. Megan needs one too, actually.)
on November 30, 2006 at 7:02 am Tom wrote:
Seems to be overloaded — thanks for the info, though. I’ll keep checking back. Are the webcasts nine hours long or something?
on November 30, 2006 at 7:30 am Doug wrote:
I don’t know, I haven’t sat through them. Amusingly, I just saw this morning an internal thread in which people are debating whether this promotion is a good thing or a bad thing.
on November 30, 2006 at 11:15 am Tom wrote:
Interesting — how could it be a bad thing? I mean, they won’t get a LOT of takers (in the thousands for sure, but perhaps not the tens of thousands), it costs Microsoft next to nothing except lost income on the licenses (which for single seats doesn’t amount to much by comparison to corporate stuff), lets MS control what users see and hear for a chunk of time, and is a great PR move for two products that are kind of under a lot of fire in the media these days. It opens MS up to sarcasm from a subset of viewers, but they’d be whining about something no matter what.
Or am I missing something? It’s been known to happen, you know …
on November 30, 2006 at 11:42 am Doug wrote:
It’s not the free-giveaway aspect that’s being debated, actually. The thing some people don’t like is the trend toward separate non-Microsoft.com sites for various products — Xbox.com, www.iis.net, and so on.
The two sides of the debate are generally “Microsoft.com isn’t cool, so we have to create other sites to host new ideas” vs. “if Microsoft.com isn’t cool, then let’s fix that ASAP”.
I’ve sidestepped this one, I must admit. I have a little over 3000 un-read emails in my various in-boxes right now, so I’m picking my spots. Geez, I’ve become a Redmondite now … 3000 unread emails. Did you ever hear the one about how we’re experts in efficiency?
on November 30, 2006 at 2:40 pm Tom wrote:
Wow — that debate has historically gotten some play on Slashdot, too. I think it should go both ways — something that is clearly a separate product (Xbox, for example) should be marketed separately. But Microsoft does need to fix its image a bit.
Honestly, I don’t know how to do it. People like my mother will always be suspicious of Bill Gates (not even Microsoft — she thinks Bill Gates is personally sending her error messages), but from what I’ve seen from digging through the developers’ sites from your links has led me to believe that either a) Microsoft has always had a lot of interesting, dedicated people who aren’t well represented by the media play and therefore MS has the worst PR department in the world; or b) things are changing around there.
I tend toward the latter — the real products with real problems that came out for years are an indication that the mentality was different around Redmond before. I just wish you guys could shake it now. There are still problems: DRM (digital rights management, not Doug Richard Mahugh, but watch your back anyway around the acronym-challenged of Redmond); activation woes that so get in the way of the legal user that they harm paying customers as much as pirates; and so on.
But the interesting thing is that most of the problems I think bog Microsoft down (including the two examples above) are business decisions, not coding decisions.
I don’t know how to fix it — you can’t buy a half-hour of primetime and expect people to watch a show about how dedicated your coders are. Nor can you expect webcasts to work — the webcast-savvy people who are most suspicious of MS will watch them and be sarcastic, and the people who you most want to improve relations with aren’t really the webcast crowd (again, my mother). But that’s why PR guys make big bucks. That leaves TV advertising, and Apple’s got you guys beat hands down (sorry, but it’s true — those Mac guy vs. PC guy ads are genius).
Speaking of PR guys … hey, Scott, any ideas? If I can help pitch it to Bill and Steve, I’ll even buy a suit that fits. Caaaaaall me … (you can’t see the phone-hand thing I’m doing next to my head, but trust that it’s there).
on November 30, 2006 at 3:21 pm Doug wrote:
Hey Tom, here’s a site that your mother will love:
http://www.billgatesforpresident.net/
on December 4, 2006 at 12:35 pm Scott wrote:
Tom…
No problem. We’ll run it up the flag pole and see who salutes. Put it in the pipe and see how the smoke curls. Blue sky it a bit. Pee in the pool and see who’s afraid to get their hair wet. Know what I’m taaakin’ about?
RFP me.
sp
on December 4, 2006 at 8:56 pm Doug wrote:
Geez. This is why I never swim in hotel pools, because so many PR guys are out there traveling on business.
on December 5, 2006 at 7:02 am Scott wrote:
We’ll have to fast track that notion when you get back. You know…review the deliverables and incent the right metrics. Maybe yodel it over the canyon and see what it sounds like coming back.
Safe travels!
sp