posted 2007/06/12 at 16:03
Writing about video games last night made me think about my feelings about Microsoft a bit more than I'd been doing lately. On the one hand, I'm kind of hesitant to say anything bad about Microsoft right now because they're currently hiring Ariel as a consultant, and I do use an awful lot of their products from Windows to Word to an original generation Xbox. On the other hand, Microsoft engages in a lot of business practices I strongly disagree with, and I know a lot of my readers feel the same way. Before I went back to school I'd set up my computer at the time to dual-boot Windows and Linux, and had I not gotten caught up with the demands of school and kind of been forced into using Windows for a lot of things (UT had few Macs and no Linux systems in their computer labs), I think I probably would have made the switch over to Linux. As it was, I really haven't followed Linux there for quite a long time, and I think I just have too many other things in my life to keep track of right now to bother with relearning Linux and porting all of my files and stuff over. I do use Microsoft products for both work and play, but I'd hardly consider myself a fan of the company.
Anyway, it's been hard not to notice the way Microsoft has inundated the Internet advertising market lately with ads for their new Live Search service/portal/soon-to-be-millionth failed attempt at trying to conquer the portal market. Now, normally these kinds of things don't attract my attention, but recently I keep seeing ads for the games Microsoft has put on Live Search, and what's troubling me about these ads is that the games that they're advertising are games that I can remember playing on Yahoo! Games five or six years ago, but with different graphics, e.g. a Text Twist rip-off using some weird chicken-and-egg graphical scheme but the exact same game mechanics. It's one thing when a company does a poor imitation of another company's offering and tries to sell it as new and innovative (such as Microsoft's aerial photography being second-rate compared to Google's similar offering), but when a company as large as Microsoft tries to repackage a game that old, then puts in a huge ad buy to advertise the game to the mass market, it just makes you wonder what exactly they're trying to accomplish.
I know that there are people out there who might not have heard of Text Twist before and may first hear of the game through Microsoft's version, and that Microsoft already has enough influence on the portal market through their MSN service that they'll get a large number of people to play the game simply because it's available through them now. Still, though, there's a part of me that feels strangely insulted by Microsoft thinking that putting new graphics on an incredibly old (albeit still entertaining) Internet game is something that merits as much advertising as I've seen for it over the past week or so. Granted, it doesn't make much sense for Microsoft to use their advertising money to advertise products and services where they're already dominant (operating systems and office software to name just two), but at the same time you'd think that perhaps they might lower their advertising budget just a bit in order to spend more money doing things like, say, fixing all of the problems I've heard about in Vista. (That being said, if cutting the advertising budget means cutting Ariel, then I'd rather continue to see those ads.)
Going back to what I touched on a few weeks ago...if you needed any proof that Detroit is really Baseball Town, well, you got it tonight.
Not to diminish Verlander's accomplishment last night or how crazy Detroit is about the Tigers right now, but given that a no-hitter still has a certain mystique about it that other team sports' individual accomplishments can't match, plus the fact that the Tigers have had so few no-hitters in their long history, yesterday could be an outlier. Let's see what attendance at Comerica Park is like a month from now (although I certainly hope it's high).
copyright © 2008 Sean Shannon