Long

Filed under Art, Creativity, Thoughts, Video | 1 Comment

I have to admit that I liked and enjoyed the - unfortunately only - two Microsoft ads featuring Jerry Seinfeld and Bill Gates. In case you have not seen them, here they are…

and

For me, Microsoft has redeemed itself for all the bad things it has done in the past. That might sound a bit strong, but these ads are so good that I admire Microsoft that it had the guts to run them. OK, it must have been so far beyond anything the usually confused participants in this game could understand that it was mostly rejected - and the ads have been pulled.

I think that the ads have nearly a Monty-Pythonishness and only a person well trained in Douglas-Adamishness can really appreciate them. This group is rather small, so it was drowned by the masses.

Compared to the Apple ads with John Hodgman as PC and Justin Long as Mac the Microsoft ads are so totally senseless that they have broken reality - and I can’t help it, but I like surreal. Forces you to look beyond the daily seriousness. OK, the Apple ads don’t appear serious, but they are, they are adversarial in nature by trying to put down the PC. (Funny side note that the PC character became the more lovable and better known, publishing books and being interviewed by Xeni Jardin of Boing-Boing fame.)

Now lets look at the MS ads - off-the-wall, surreal and imaginative - and, I forgot, weird. What MS shows me here is that they could be just as unusual as Apple as a company, but that they have decided not to go this route because there were too few people to understand what they would have been doing. Instead they went with that what is real to most people - confusion!

So, by catering to the reality of this majority of the population, they managed to dominate the world with their software and now they can come out of the closed - and they did.

Congratulations!

Posted by Merlin - September 19th, 2008

Feb

5

DIY - How to Build Your Own Glasses

Filed under Art, Creativity, Fun Stuff | Leave a Comment

Lego just had it’s 50th birthday, and we really should congratulate this company for these great toys. Yes, they are often seen as toys, but more and more people discover that they are much, much more.

We have not seen yet, real skyscrapers or bridges built out of Legos (or better Lego Bricks, how the company want us to call them) but I can not imagine that this will be too far in the future.

Ho do I get such a crazy idea, you might wonder.

Look at this, if this guy can build glasses that are so much more useful than regular ones with just a bit of ingenuity, boring subjects like houses, and bridges can not be far behind.

During engaging computer work…

Lego glasses during work