Apple-Microsoft add war gets ugly

The multimillion-dollar ad war between Microsoft and Apple has turned nasty, with Apple firing the latest salvo in an attempt to continue to define Vista as a broken, bug-ridden operating system.

Apple’s ads have long lampooned the PC for being staid and uncool but, this time, Apple’s target isn’t the PC per se, but Microsoft’s marketing strategy.

The first of two new ads shows PC, played by John Hodgman, allocating stacks of dollar bills toward either “advertising” or “fix Vista”, with the bulk of the money going to advertising.

The ad is a swipe at Microsoft’s $US300 million ($430 million) ad campaign to redefine Windows Vista’s image, which featured stars including comedian Jerry Seinfeld (reportedly paid $US10 million for his appearance), actress Eva Longoria, singer Pharrell Williams and even the author Deepak Chopra.

A belated response to Apple’s highly successful “I’m a Mac, I’m a PC” ads, the campaign sought to paint Apple and Mac users as elitists by presenting a slew of everyday PC users, such as scientists and teachers, espousing the virtues of their platform of choice.

“Hello, I’m a PC and I’ve been made into a stereotype,” says a Microsoft engineer in one of the ads.

The second new ad from Apple shows PC brandishing a buzzer, beeping out the word “Vista” whenever it is mentioned by the Mac character, played by actor Justin Long.

“We don’t say the V word any more. It doesn’t sit well with frustrated PC users. From now on we’re going to use a word with a lot less baggage: Windows,” PC says in the ad, which appears to be a dig at Microsoft’s strategy of not mentioning the word “Vista” in its ads.

While Microsoft’s entire campaign seeks to convey the message that many of the earlier problems plaguing Vista have since been fixed through software updates, Apple’s new ads ignore this and continue to portray Vista as a broken operating system.

Apple appears to be winning the public perception war. Its ads ran for years without a response from Microsoft and, even after the company’s recent ad campaign, Apple still appears to own the narrative and its definition of Vista has stuck.

A ranking of global brands released in March this year put Microsoft in 59th spot, down from 11th in 2004. Brand consultancy CoreBrand, which produced the rankings, said at the time that Apple’s advertising campaign “may have taken its toll on Microsoft”.

In a recent experiment Microsoft rounded up people who had negative views of Vista and showed them a “new” operating system, codenamed Mojave. More than 90 per cent of respondents gave positive feedback on Mojave, which was actually just standard Windows Vista.

Microsoft hasn’t been helped by the fact that private emails released during a court case this year showed that even Microsoft’s top executives had compatibility and stability problems with Vista when it was released.

Further, Vista is in danger of being skipped over by a large proportion of consumers because the next iteration of Windows, dubbed Windows 7, is due for general release late next year.

An early version of Windows 7 will be handed out to developers attending Microsoft’s Professional Developers Conference in Los Angeles this month

Microsoft Started bus service for employees

Microsoft Started bus service for employees & Employees can start work from the bus itself and their office hours counts from the time they start work in the bus
Traffic jam is quite normal and company do not want to waste the time of the employees in Roads.

Microsoft prepping ‘Instant On’ OS?

Survey suggests Redmond is at least looking at boot times

 

With the state of Microsoft’s fragile ego these days, it’s hardly surprising to hear that it’s reaching out to customers to finally get some idea about what they actually want in an OS.

Among many MS surveys the company conducts during a typical year, the latest suggests that the company is looking to reduce Windows boot times drastically – possibly even entirely, if we’re lucky.

Netbook experience

The poll, sent to a few registered Windows users, asks about the appeal of an “Instant On experience” similar to that on some Linux netbooks and Dell’s Latitude laptops.

It goes on to say, in somewhat contradictory terms, that ‘Instant On’ would mean some key aspects (probably just the browser, we reckon) of a PC being usable within eight seconds.

Better than nothing

While that’s better than sitting through a strobing Windows logo for over a minute, it’s still hardly instant. Ah well – you know what they say about beggars and choosers, eh?

How to Solve Access Denied Deleting Files Folders

To delete a file or folder but having Windows prompts a popup saying the file/folder is still in use is simply annoying.

Cannot delete xxx: Access is denied. Make sure the disk is not full or write-protected and the file is not currently in use.

This happens because the file may look fine to delete but it is still engaged with a particular Window application processes. Fauzi of cyperhackz cares enough to share his methods to deal with these annoying Windows issue.

Fauzi has suggested 3 methods to force delete these files; via command prompt, safe mode and Unlocker application. Command prompt is the fastest solution to delete regardlessly of Window’s Access Denied message but it just can’t do its trick on deleting folder with multiple folders. Usually when such situation occurs, we wanna get it of the file fast, therefore I think safe mode will not be my choice.

experiment

, and a small experiment

Unlocker solves the Access Denied Deleting nicely. I did a little experiement; engaged a folder to CuteFTP’s process, and try to delete it from desktop.

Windows gives me Access Denied popup, I closed it, Unlocker then popup appears. Unlock with Unlocker, files deleted. Pretty clean.

Go to Unlocker download page