Charles on… anything that comes along

Nope, that’s right; blame it on things like infrared camera-ranging systems interfering with the infrared controllers, a power outage just before the start, and, oh, alpha software. Sean Alexander, who took part in the speech, takes you through it.

(Why is this also under “Advice for PRs”? Because it’s a great example of the person involved getting the story straightened out without requiring a million telephone interviews. Put it on the web in his own words, and that’s your rebuttal sorted.)

These posts might be related (the database thinks..):
• Bill Gates's RDF (Runtime Destruction Field) (7 January 2005; score: 80.96%)
• "The state of Windows" (27 October 2004; score: 68.81%)
• Farewell to Bill Gates: I doubt we'll see his equal again (12 January 2008; score: 51.44%)

Over at The Register I’ve written an analysis of where the iPod is, where everything else is, and tried to get it all in perspective - iPods, rivals, Mac minis, Microsoft, and how many will buy the one, the other, and what this means for Switching.

Your comments welcome..

These posts might be related (the database thinks..):
• A neat problem for Fraser (31 August 2007; score: 74.72%)
• Mac mini: my review at The Independent (9 February 2005; score: 62.42%)
• Oh, and don't tell anyone till tomorrow, but that's the last NDA I'll sign (12 December 2005; score: 61.93%)

Glenn of Tidbits considers the Mac mini: “The Mac mini has a number of similarities with the doomed G4 Cube.. I’ve posted a table with a head-to-head comparison of specs, and they’re eerily alike. [But] The Cube failed in promising a kind of perfection in design that the manufacturing process was often unable to meet, and in having a premium price over the simultaneously introduced Power Mac models that offered more performance, expandability, and familiarity. The Mac mini suffers from none of these defects.

The Mac mini essentially cuts the lungs out of the PC world’s (and many columnists’) argument about Macs costing too much… I went to Dell’s site and configured their cheapest Dimension 3000 with no monitor and the closest set of minimum specifications: they lack built-in speakers, so I added the cheapest set ($20), but they include a keyboard and mouse, which offsets about $50 of cost on the Mac side for the same quality of input devices.

The Dell Dimension 3000? $627 including a $50 rebate versus $499 for the Mac mini.”

It’s going to be very interesting to hear what the order numbers are like. Trouble is, price alone isn’t the whole story. You still need to move your life over from a PC to a Mac to “Switch”. I’m slightly surprised Apple didn’t try to bundle Move2Mac with it. When I asked one of their people why not, he gave me one of those looks which either means “Hell! I knew there was still something on the To-do list!” or “How stupid is this person?” Trouble is, the answer he gave - noncommittal - didn’t indicate which was in his mind.

(Via ExtraBITS.)

These posts might be related (the database thinks..):
• At LAST! Dell gets its own rumours site (4 February 2005; score: 76.24%)
• Dell explains why it killed customer forums (sort of); and that Shuttle delay in full (14 July 2005; score: 58.61%)
• Dell shuts customer support forums.. because they're full of criticism (13 July 2005; score: 53.52%)

Seen in a little snippet from Forrester Research:

The Consumer Advertising Backlash Worsens - Business View Trends, by Jim Nail: Consumers’ impatience with ad clutter on their TVs, PCs, telephones, and inboxes accelerated between 2002 and 2004, spurring behaviors that block these annoyances. Women and young adults remain slightly more open to ads, especially entertaining ads or ones for new products.

If ad-blocking behaviors slash media companies’ ad revenues, will consumers make up the difference out of their own pocket? No. The amount consumers are willing to pay for ad-free TV amounts to only one-tenth of TV ad revenues.

Of course, this is talking about the US, where advertising (of all sorts) is much more intrusive than in the UK; in the UK when the BBC showed “24 Hours”, in which each hour-long episode was meant to happen in real time, they only lasted 50 minutes. Ten minutes of ads per hour? No thanks. In the UK, of course, there’s the BBC which provides four TV channels ad-free, plus numerous radio channels and a huge web presence, all ad-free too, and thus free from commercial pressures.

I’m often very glad of the BBC for showing us just how things can be. It’s about the closest to an ideal world one gets.

These posts might be related (the database thinks..):
• Last week's Independent article: why ".xxx" won't be a workable red-light district on the Net (15 June 2005; score: 23.06%)
• Microsoft Live (and some reactions), Steve Jobs un-biographied, and this Amoeba won't duplicate! (3 November 2005; score: 22.42%)
• Once more, with feeling: Boot Camp won't move Mac users to Windows (17 April 2006; score: 21.73%)