Can this week ever end?

Robert – After decades of spreading fear, uncertainty, and doubt about competitors, its a little amusing watching your company flail about helplessly – and by actions of their own doing. I think its called karma!

“I’m tired of anonymous jerks”

So don’t allow anonymous posting. It’s very simple.

“getting very close to turning off comments”

Why don’t you then? Stop moaning about it – either deal with the trolls like everyone else has to, or give up.

Robert, Smarthome is a tiny little minnow of a magazine website! If you’d asked someone familiar with it before demanding Richards fire… err… himself, they would have told you to ignore the story. Instead you’ve driven his traffic thru the roof.

I’m the last person who should try to teach anybody about PR after my own smaller but still nasty run-in with the blogosphere.

But even I would tell you not to threaten to turn off your comments on your blog – that just creates a bigger story and makes it run for another week. You won’t shut the story down, but you might become the subject of a feature article in WIRED, and you don’t want that.

Just ignore any comment that doesn’t merit an answer, please don’t denigrate or demean people, or shut us all out entirely. We can see some of these people are idiots for ourselves, we don’t need you to point it out. Doing that for us makes you seem reactionary, rude and willing to try anything to win an argument.

alan: good advice. It’s not about winning an argument. It’s about being attacked by people who you don’t know where they are coming from (and, yes, I suspect that they are working for competitors).

Regarding Smarthome. Yeah, that’s the danger of answering real concerns, but it was at the top of Memeorandum before I posted about it and the crap he spewed was being spread by other bloggers so I had to answer the claims. Worrying that I’ll help a jerk out by posting about them isn’t something I can take into account when the damage is spreading.

>So don’t allow anonymous posting. It’s very simple.

Yeah, right. There’s no way to do that.

There is a hierarchy of who we should be listening to, though. At the very bottom are those who are anonymous. Why? Cause if you won’t sign your name (in a verifyable way) to what you write you simply are not worth listening to.

Robert, you ever going to correct your wrong statement about Adobe and Universal Binaries?

Because you know, for you to get so angry about people’s misstatements about Microsoft when you refuse to correct your own misstatements about Adobe is you know, kind of hypocritical.

And with you being so concerned with the truth and accuracy, I’m sure you wouldn’t want to be guilty of that which you are actively fighting.

Oh yeah – WordPress.com not standalone WP. Hmmm….

John: first of all, I don’t read it the way you do. Second of all, I link to his post so my readers can get the Adobe guy’s story. To compare what I wrote (which was possibly unclear writing) to what this “60% guy” wrote is just sheer lunacy.

But, whatever, I just updated the post so that it’s very clear now what I meant.

Robert, accurate and correct are just that. Someone else being inaccurate and incorrect does not make you doing it okay. Secondly, he never, ever, ever said Adobe can’t release Intel versions of its Mac applications, which was what your original link said.

He explained why they won’t be updating the current versions to be universal binaries, and will instead make the next versions universal. The way you wrote it was incorrect, and inaccurate. Period. I’m glad you corrected it, but for you to get so friggin’ mad about people being inaccurate and incorrect when you were doing the same thing was dumb, and you know it.

Just because Andrew’s never found a fact he couldn’t dodge doesn’t make it okay when you’re incorrect.

The fact you are trying to justify it now instead of just saying “Oh crap, I screwed up. Here’s the correct way of describing that post, sorry about that”, is a sure sign that you’ve been doing Microsoft PR for too long. “Even though I was wrong, I’ll never admit it, even when it is clearly apparent and obvious”.

If you want to rail about this kind of crap then SET THE EXAMPLE.

John: whatever. I sure wish you’d use this moral outrage against that guy in Australia. Or, maybe, against Andrew Orlowski.

Unlike those two guys I actually linked so that my readers could get the whole story. The link corrected anything stupid I wrote. Sorry you don’t get that difference.

Robert, the difference is you listen. Andrew never has, never will. I don’t read his crap, because it’s all Dvorkian/Enderleist traffic generating crap, and he’s not a particularly good writer.

Last week, Matt Deatherage made a bet on the Macjournals Subscriber list that certain people would report this as wrong, solely because it would generate hits. Nice to see that Andrew doesn’t disappoint.

You will, after a bit of effort, admit error, and even correct it. You’ll kvetch about it, but you’ll do it. That puts you far above Andrew and his ilk. You’ll note that I link to you on my site, and not the Reg. (Although I really do have to fix that link location…oy) I don’t agree with most of what you say about things, and you have an amazing talent for speed-induced hoofinmouth, but you do try to be as correct as your flying fingers will allow you.

If we can just get you to start proof-reading better, then a large chunk of the comment traffic would go away.

The entire 60% issue is silly anyway, because it can be both true and untrue depending on how you count. If you only count new code, then it’s so stupid as to be humorous. But if you count lines of code that will be touched in the process of bug hunting, and adding in things like WPF/E (That would kind of make it not feature – complete nor in full lockdown, when they’re talking about adding that support in Q3 2006, which is where some of the problem is coming from), then I will bet you a dollar that you could show 60% of the code has been changed.

People are getting pissy about a number with absolutely zero context, but that’s what people do in this country. They jump on facts without context.

But seriously, if I ranked you with Orlowski, I’d just post an occasional link to stuff you write calling you a complete jackass, and you sure as heck wouldn’t be on my site as a permanent link. Besides, you made CARs! That shows you have FAR more cred than Orlowski! Even Dori agreed, you’re like, officially famous now. Only the Mac Glitterati make CARs

Thanks John, for all of our disagreements, at least I know where you are coming from and who you are. Makes you 1000x more valuable/credible/interesting than the anonymous commenters. Not to mention that someday I can buy you a beer at Macworld and have a laugh.

Much ado about nothing. That Smarthome web site often posts outdated info. Just last week they posted a review of the “new G5 iMac” for god’s sake. How long have the Intel ones been out now?

While I can honeslty say that the idea of Vista used to makes me tingle back in 2002…from what and changed in the last 6yrs I am honeslty not impressed with the end result. If this had been rlease is say 2005 or late 04 I would be amazed. I realize that a lot of hard work went into making vista, and I’m not trying to say that it was shoty work, just that I honeslty expected more from Microsoft.

From 2000 to XP it was a interface upgrade, some security fixes/memory management and .zip handeling in 2yrs, that wasnt to bad, as they wernt really needed, but the UI and .zip addition was a nice addition. But here we ar in 2006, XP is the standard, but 2000 will still do the job very well, and Vista almost seems like an upgrade that really offers nothing to the majority of users. MS touts security and stability in every new release, that nothing new, but Honeslty I feel like something is just lacking in Vista, but I’m not sure what. I just honeslty expected well, better.

I will most likely upgrade simply for teh speed and memory managemnt changes, but I sadly have found myself looking into OSX and linux as possible alternatives. I;m not sure if I simply expected to much in 6ys, or if its all the delays, and 5yrs of XP have just worn me out.

Either way, greetings from Neowin.

Thanks for the neowin.net mention. We definitely appreciate it.

Well, if you’d have shown up at Macworld earlier this year, that beer would have been on me, and I could have shown you how a conference can be run well, and have value, even in the glorious “Web 2.0″ world

But hey, you said free beer, so woohoo!

Your reference to “in Australia” and your partners is pretty much pathetic, Robert. First off, Microsoft lives and dies by its partners… or so you keep telling everyone until you cannibalise another one of their markets through illegal bundling tactics.

Secondly, just because a story breaks out of Australia, you needn’t make it sound as though somehow the very location makes it dubious. Last time I checked your company took a billion dollars a year out of Australia, perhaps instead of scoffing, you should just say thank you.

I liked you better when you were fresh to Microsoft, now you’re probably doing them more harm than good. The jounalist in question got a story, he quoted directly a source that as the marketing manager for a partner could legitimately know that type of information. We’re also talking about an award winning journalist who broke one of the biggest corruption cases in Australia’s history (I know you don’t think much of us, but hey). So, perhaps rather than dismiss him so out of hand, perhaps the blogging mouthpiece of Microsoft should check the facts and find out the truth. If your own people come back with “No Comment” or “We don’t discuss product development details” then perhaps a simple apology to the journalist in question would suffice.

Sean: you’re right. I was over the top. For the record, Raymond of Acer called me tonight. Let’s just say that what he told the “journalist” wasn’t reported the way he wanted it to be.

Mr. Scoble, I come from a very different background (branding), so let me offer a different perspective here. I don’t think this is either about Vista or the 60% re-write story (much as you’d like to focus the discussion around that path). It’s about perceptions of MS as a company.

Over the last 10 years, there is a visible shift from product brands to company brands. It is driven (more and more) by how companies behave (than the product features). in the mid-90s, MS was seen as the super smart underdog in technology space where IBM was the faltering, arrogant giant. The browser wars, and the subsequent surrounding events, changed that. It was seen by many people as a bully. Still super smart, but a bully. To many, it had also become scheming and unscruplous.

If you notice, more people are asking for things like transparency, consistency (in statements coming out from the company over a periodof time) than perfect code. MS should not ignore these signals. Some of the language may be abrasive, the people may not count for much in your eyes, and they may be full time MS-baiters and haters; but i suggest that you try reading between the lines when you are more relaxed and this thing has blown over.

I am also awed by your stamina in reading and reacting to all comments.

Interesting post here, who makes up stuff like this anyway?

Buon luogo, congratulazioni, il mio amico!