Bolg - The Chris Blanc Weblog

Let’s talk about hype and Windows Vista. No, I’m not talking about Microsoft hype. I’m talking about the people who hate it.

If you listen to the chatter on the Internet, Ron Paul won the presidency, Windows Vista has failed, everyone’s going to buy a Macintosh and it’s really important what happened last night on Lost. That’s only if you listen.

[D]uring my speech to the Association of PC User Groups, I asked how many of the 180 in attendance were using Windows Vista.

At least half of those in attendance raised their hands, probably more. Frankly, I was fairly surprised.

APCUG is a national affiliation of user groups around the country — organizations such as HAL-PC and the Houston Area Apple Users Group. Their members generally are older, many are retirees, and while they are enthusiastic about tech, they’re often cautious about adopting the latest and greatest. ^{^}

Writers spend a good deal of their lives trying to get to the real story. That means what’s actually happening, as opposed to some third-party rendering of it, whether in the form of media attention or anecdotes or rumors. When you get past all the chatter and misinformation (and, where corporations are concerned, outright disinformation) you’ll find the truth. You have to keep looking for it, foraging for it, digging for it. That’s why we like detective stories. The lone thinker rides into town, digs and gets laughed at for it, then solves the case and everyone else looks fat and stupid.

The blogosphere always puts a spin on things because it’s self-referential. You have all these bloggers writing about what the others have written. It’s a natural amplification effect like that of the media itself. If CNN writes an article about artichoke marmalade, you can bet that Fox news will as well. And journalists are far from impartial, since many of them have spouses and family members working at these companies. They form a natural amplification channel that will talk something to death once it becomes trendy in the media.

This is why blogs and media form an important future, and it’s not clear who is assimilating whom. Blogs usually take stories from the media and put them into the indie spin for which blogs are famous, but the large media outfits watch blogs for trends. Together, this is probably 2% of the population of North America and England dictating what the rest of us think is trendy.

While I am certainly not endorsing a candidate, going by traditional measuring, Ron Paul has about as much luck as an armadillo in a freeway during rush hour: i.e. No chance. However, when you go on the Internet, he’s been hailed as the man who can lead us all to the Promised Land.

I don’t begrudge his supporters one bit, I just don’t get the online/off-line disconnect. ^{^}

It’s important to remember when marketing your products that this is the case, and it’s one powerful reason that branding and brand identity are of paramount importance. You want to get people to have a vision of your brand, and to start repeating that in the small closed circles of bloggers, Hollywood, media workers and fashion designers. What these people speak others repeat, and so your brand identity becomes a meme of its own.

Another example of the hype working well is the Asus Eee minilaptop. As a recent article states, Asus and Intel are getting close because this new machine cuts out all the BS people don’t need with a laptop. They want to check email, surf the web, type documents and play minesweeper, and that’s it for 95% of laptop use.

The Eee is not only threatening hardware manufacturers by introducing a 95% solution at 35% of the going price, but is also redefining what people expect from a mobile operating system. A stripped down Linux as offered on the Eee by default lets you do all the tasks you need to for that 95% solution, but also gives you the ability to extend your operating system as you need with low-impact software. True, a lot of the open source offerings, like Open Office, really are inferior to the closed source software they are cloning. People will get around that given time.

Windows Vista is not yet the 95% solution. It requires too much hardware, and it’s a work in progress, but it’s moving slowly toward acceptance the same way Windows XP did (and I actually remember people saying they’d never give up Windows 98 because it was “the best so far”). Over time, Vista will get better and more people accept it.

In the meantime, I know more than a few people who are happily using it. Most of them aren’t technical gurus, but a few are. If you read the blogosphere, or the media, you wouldn’t know that to be true but it is. Between the hype and reality there’s opportunity for those who want to build brands and make ideas reach their audience.