You Don’t Need A Blog

Tuesday, December 9th, 2008

Read the post at Spoke Marketing's Spoken Whirred blog.

Dear Corporate America,

Wednesday, November 19th, 2008

Please stop using Internet Explorer 6.  It came out in 2001, is riddled with bugs and forces developers that want to use cool tools like MooTools write CSS and HTML hacks that make me cringe.

I understand you are fearful of change.  I get it.  Don’t upgrade to Office 2007.  Doesn’t bother me at all. Don’t upgrade to Vista.  Heck that OS compelled me to switch to a Mac. I also understand that your IT support staff is not prepared for the onslaught of calls due to the ribbon replacing menus in Office 07.

But the whole goal of Internet Explorer 7 was to be more secure (i.e. less for you to worry about).  Especially now that it’s been out for 2 years.  Also, it’s a browser, so it won’t crash your network or cause a flood of calls to your IT support center.

In conclusion, this is my plea to you corporate America, to do what’s best for web developers everywhere and upgrade to IE7 already.  The world of tab pages and standards based CSS support awaits you.

Sincerely,

Brian Schwartz

Pandora – Localized Advertising Confirmed

Thursday, November 13th, 2008

So today I'm listening to Pandora again and I see the ad below, confirming what I guessed at in a previous post – Pandora is geographically targeting ads to users. 


This banner ad is specifically for an open house at the University on November 21. This Open House is in St. Louis.

The landing page is also well-done because it's well designed and has the requisite social media sharing toolbar.  Although it should probably list the address of the open house on the landing page somewhere. 

 
A few years ago I managed a similar campaign for another college in St. Louis, and although those campaigns were successful at driving traffic from direct mail, organic searches and pay-per-click advertising , it
would have been nice to use other tools like this.

Well done Fontbonne and well done Pandora.

Banner Ads… On TV??

Thursday, July 31st, 2008

Watching last comic standing and couldn’t help but notice the banner ads promoting the mummy movie. The attempts to get ads past the DVR take a new step. Hope this doesn’t catch on.

Get a Mac: Sad Song

Tuesday, May 13th, 2008

This commercial about sums up my previous post about why I switched to a mac.  My less than a year old HP laptop sits gathering dust, while I type this on my MacBook Pro (now with 4 Gb of RAM!!!)

Life in Parallels is Great… or how I learned to stop worrying and embrace the Mac

Friday, April 25th, 2008

I used to be a programmer. 

I used to be a programmer using only Microsoft tools.

I used to love those tools.

I now use a Mac. 

WOW.  After being a "Microsoft" programmer and a project manager for a good chunk of my career, I have now switched to Mac full time. 

If Microsoft can’t keep me as a customer, they are in trouble. 
Why did they lose me?  Simple. 
I want my computer to work – all the time. 
I don’t like it crashing.
I don’t like it going slow.
I don’t like having to learn how to fix problems in the registry.

7 month agos I bought a brand new HP Laptop with Windows Vista and Dual Core Intel / 4Gb of RAM.  After a few weeks, I realized it was pretty slow and clunky.  I’d even been using Vista since it came out so those issues were nothing new for me. 

Fast forward a couple months and my HP laptop keeps getting slower and was getting more and more buggy (even with the what seemed like millions of windows updates every week).  Every once in a while it would just crash.  Every time I closed powerpoint I would get an error.  Etc. Etc.  I’d had enough and wanted to find something better.   

So, I bought a used Mac on EBay, just to confirm that it would work for my needs.  It did and after about a month I bought a brand new MacBook Pro.  I was then able to install Parallels, install Windows on my Mac (for a few apps, namely Quickbooks) and have both on it  Guess what?  After a month, I only use the Windows side on Parallels for accounting or testing websites on internet explorer. 

I am a full convert, and unfortunately for Microsoft I’m not alone. 

My wife had never used a Mac and she isn’t nearly as technically educated as I am, yet I gave her my old mac laptop with no training.  Two days later I came home and she had printed about 20 pictures using iPhoto and our wireless printer.  It’s been a month and she loves it and guess what?  It’s never crashed, nor had any problems.  Another convert.

I’m the last person who would have expected to switch, but I did and I couldn’t be happier.  Macs used to have 3% of the OS market, now they are around 7%.  Why?  Because they work. Simple. 

What’s the lesson here?  I see two of them:
1. Develop a superior product, market it well (as opposed to IBM’s O/S 2) and even with a company that seems to have a huge monopoly over you, you can gain market share.
2. Rest on your laurels, release products that upset consumers, and watch your market share fail.