Respect Sakura

When you can’t copy your competitors’ shit well enough, and your latest product is perceived as a joke by the public at large, then it’s time to do the ol’ IBM marketing strategy of Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt.

First, Ballmer fired a warning shot off the bow by stating Macs are too expensive, then their marketing agency went to work with this little gem, about how some woman wants a 17″ notebook for $1,000 USD (that’s about 1.4 grand for us, down under). She winds up with an unnamed “HP Pavillion” for $699 USD, and while the specs aren’t advertised, I expect it’s something along the lines of this.

Nice work, Lauren. You just netted yourself a slower, more power hungry notebook, with - what I’d imagine at that pricepoint - a smaller sized battery to boot. That Best Buy site reports that you’ll get 2 & 1/2 hours of battery life out of that, and because we all know that manufacturers are liars, I’m sure you’d be lucky to see even 1 hour of that. And what’s with the 17″ screen? Okay, she wears glasses so I can see the whole “I’m blind lol” aspect, but my girlfriend has this issue as well, and doesn’t have a problem with her 13″ notebook. Lugging a 17″ sonofabitch around is so patently ridiculous that she should have just went for a desktop, instead. Gee, for just $300 more in her budget, she could have been cool enough to have a not-so-painful keyboard to type on, more portability, and ~3 hours more battery life. Not to mention the added performance of not having a CPU and architecture that sucks.

If times are so hard that you can’t muster up $300USD extra for a notebook, if the extra dosh is such a difficult thing to come by, then what the fuck are you doing buying a notebook in the first place? Do something productive, like tackle your credit card debt or put additional money on your mortgage. Stock up on beans, and get yourself a shotgun for the impending collapse of modern society as we know it. It’s irresponsible fuckers like you that got us in this mess.

So once this rolled around, it was obvious that Microsoft are out to spread yet more FUD. This fellow is named Giampaolo, and he’s after a notebook with portability, battery life, and “power” for $1,500. So naturally, he gets this. A 16″ notebook, that weighs 7 pounds (3.2kgs), and while they don’t list the battery life, I can imagine with the dedicated video card, the 2.4GHz processor, the fingerprint reader, the Altec Lansing Dolby-up-the-arse super duper speakers (with a subwoofer!), and all the other needless shit, that it’s somewhere between 2 hours and fuck all. But that’s all okay, because it’s got a 9600M GT with 512MB of VRAM, and a 500GB hard drive, meaning it’s going to be great at playing games - when sitting at home, connected to AC.

It’s kind of like the end of the third Terminator movie, when Skynet apparently goes out onto the internet on every computer on the earth, and then begins firing nukes at cities and residential areas - where all these computers reside. To paraphrase Yahtzee, they couldn’t have missed the point more if they were facing the opposite direction, and the point was in another country. If the guy wanted something portable to play Far Cry 2 on, he should look into buying a Shuttle PC.

This is not about what these people want - it’s about what they can afford. Microsoft are taking advantage of the fact that every one’s spooked about the current economic shitstorm to spread FUD about their competitors, and the whole thing reeks of Ballmer. They’re taking misinformed, uneducated people off the street, who are only looking for one thing - the thing with the biggest numbers attached to it, for the least amount of money - as opposed to someone who really knows that when looking for a computer, you start with the most fundamental ideal - what do I want this thing to do for me?

So usually, my spiel on any kind of computer recommendations (PC, or Mac) usually starts with this: Who are you, and what do you want to do with it? What kind of history do you have with computers? Are you interested in doing Office work or playing games? Are their any specific software requirements?

That’s how you start hunting for a new system, ladies and gentlemen. Purpose, first. Price, second. Additional wanky features last.