Thursday, October 25, 2007

A man on the moon. The end of the Cold War. Alt+Tab.

As most of you will no doubt be aware - since it sits just a few posts below this one - our own Quivering P. Landmass took on Apple's iPhone campaign recently, an act which must have represented a bit of cognitive dissonance for him, since he's a Mac user and generally likes most of what they do. In that spirit, may I present to you the ad campaign for the newest Windows operating system, Vista:



To be fair, there have probably been times in my life when the interface of an operating system might have made me say "Wow" in an awed tone of voice - I'm plenty old enough to remember when the only operating system anyone used on a PC was MS/DOS - but none of those times would have been later than 1993 or so.

I mean, come on, Microsoft. A 3-D version of alt-tab (which you get by holding down the Windows button and hitting tab instead, omigod omigod omigod) is kinda neat, but it's not fucking revolutionary. Fine, it's a nice new feature, but don't you dare compare it to the fall of the Berlin Wall or the achievements of the space program, you self-absorbed twits. Of all the new features they presumably added to Vista, that's the one they chose to highlight? 3-D tabbing? For fucking real? Maybe every time they tried to highlight a more important feature, the system crashed.

And what's this "delightfully unexpected" shit? Delightfully unexpected is when I find ten bucks on the ground or the ice cream store gives me a free scoop. The fall of the Berlin Wall was "delightfully unexpected?" That's the adverb/adjective combo we're going with there? Although now that you mention it, I seem to recall Reagan saying, "It would be just peachy keen if you would tear down that wall, Mr. Gorbachev." Or when Communism fell in Russia, and Boris Yeltsin got on the tank and told the crowd how "tickled pink" the day had made him? Good times.

2 comments:

Quivering P. Landmass said...

You can use your phone to get a weather report? You can tab through your open windows three-dimensionally? Unreal. Thank you, Apple and Microsoft, for making the 21st century such a surprising, futuristic fairyland.

Andrew N.P. said...

I thought the taskbar (you know, the one that dates back to WINDOWS FUCKING NINETY-FIVE) was supposed to make Alt-Tab obsolete. Or at least a whole lot less useful. I guess this is Alt-Tab's way of coming out of retirement.

And it horrifies me to no end that stuff like this is the reason Vista takes up, what, twelve terabytes of RAM or something? Yeah. I certainly want to have to buy a whole new computer just so I can see Word documents in two-point perspective.