Microsoft wants to rename netbooks with absurd 5-word phrase
While cruising around the Internets today I came across an article on Boing Boing that was just so right on, I just had to repost it here. As we’ve been gushing about around the rgb offices lately, Microsoft is getting a lot more right than it is wrong these days…but t seems that mantra has yet to trickle down to the marketing department. Enjoy.
Steven Guggenheimer, Microsoft’s General Manager of Application Platform and Development Marketing, thinks that the term “netbook” should be abandoned. Instead, he says, such devices should be called “low cost small notebook PCs.”
Bear in mind that this chap is a marketing manager: he’s doing this because he thinks it will make it easier to sell the software. Microsoft’s soul is so attuned to selling committee-ordained business concepts to management that it just can’t help itself.
The assumed rationale is that Microsoft is trying to kill Windows XP, and wants to push newer hardware that consumers won’t assume is too feeble to run Vista or Windows 7. But Microsoft’s marketing efforts often suck the life out of its partners’ hardware. A classic example of how efficiently it turns gold into lead is Origami, a successful stealth campaign Microsoft authored as a branding metaphor for high-end pocket PCs. The buzz around the term was palpable, but when it finally lauched, “Origami” became the godless and narcoleptic “UMPC” or “Ultra Mobile Personal Computer.”
Something that had attracted enormous attention in the gadget side of tech culture faded to gray, buttoned-down Fujitsu ad spreads in Workforce Management Magazine. The dry marketing terminology made it hard to write about the devices without sounding like a press release. Something compelling became a set of specifications: a set of arguments for any given consumer to say “no.”
Perhaps this is why the Zune always has that certain cold, technical measure to it: all the team’s spiritual energy was dissipated battling marketing’s attempts to rename it something awful.
Image and text originally posted at Boing Boing Gadgets
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ive been recently reading about how slick android is on UMPC’s, I think microsoft should be investing their energies elsewhere…
this is just silly…
In the ZuneHD/Tegra post, the video on Tegra actually mentions Android and WinCE (WinMobile’s base), being able to dual boot on these new, I shit you not ‘smartbooks’ which are supposedly netbookish in size, but use mobile chips from Nvidia, Qualcomm etc so they don’t do ‘full’ OSes.
Ubuntu also demonstrated Android widgets running from inside Ubuntu itself, which is kind of interesting.
Of course, if you had your choice of spending $500 for a netbook running Android, or $525 running Windows 7, which would you pick? 🙂
well id go with windows if only just cuz… being said OS wouldnt be the selling factor for me
Yeah that ‘godless’ reference is weird. Those godless marketers! LOL.
Seriously, how can this dude blame Microsoft for the general mediocrity of ‘netbook’ marketing? Nobody put Microsoft in charge of stifling the creative minds of laptop manufacturers everywhere … they did that themselves, according to the normal human plan for doing this — focus on the $$$$.
Also IMO the reason Microsoft doesn’t like ‘netbook’ is that if you consider it a separate ‘class’ of computer then you have to admit that LINUX has made incredibly inroads on this ‘class’ but if you erase this as a category then the problem appears to go away.
Of course, it is hopeless you will never succeed in erasing this as a category, but that’s classic Microsoft. They look at a brick wall they have made and then instead of rebuilding it they simply attempt to convince everybody that ‘brick’ is a synonym for ‘window’.
Though I agree with everything else, the point about Linux making inroads on netbooks is far from accurate. Some nitpickers might say ‘the opposite of accurate’. 🙂
When netbooks first started taking off some year and a half ago, it was expected that this would be the big break for Linux, but it turned out more people were willing to pay the MS tax (generally about $25) to have Windows XP.
This is probably due to a combination of consumers wanting familiarity as well as the craptacular versions of Linux that market leaders Asus and Acer provided. They were functional, but unspectacular to say the least.
Ubuntu Netbook Remix was good (very good actually), but it wasn’t distributed WITH the hardware (and what subset of people are going to install a new OS on a ‘cheap’ computer), and the newer Moblin 2.0 has potential, but as netbooks becomes more powerful (Nvidia ION, etc), there’s even LESS incentive to put an alternate OS on there when the average person can ask… “Can I run MS Office, or Valve’s L4D on this?” and the answer is “yes”.
That’s where I think MS is trying (stupidly) trying to change the definition. As Windows 7 is just around the corner (October is a corner, right?) it’s proven to be at least as smooth as Win XP on a lower powered device but to bundle a full version of Win7 on what is a $400 machine would jack up the price quite a bit.
Because of the above reasons, I don’t think MS entirely painted themselves in this corner. It’s those damned hardware makers making cheap portable machines, and MS is trying to save their margins on the software.
Still a crappy idea to try and rename them, but the public ain’t gonna buy it, just like they’re not gonna buy Linux…
See the quote in the below link about netbook return rates being 4 times higher if they run Linux. It’s from MSi’s Director of US sales, but I’ve read similar statements from Asus and Acer as well.
http://mobilitysite.com/2008/10/linux-falters-in-netbooks/
You probably got me on the sales figures as you keep up more on the nitty gritty of this stuff. (BTW the opposite of ‘accurate’ is ‘inaccurate’, lol.) But it sounds like you agree that the renaming is in fact a response to LINUX (unless I misread your one reference to it above and I was confused by it so that may be the case) and I think that logic still holds considering all the love the press has been giving the idea of a ‘major new LINUX push on netbooks’ coming out of Computex this week the exact same show where these Microsoft remarks were made it seems to me that it would not be at all wise to abandon my original instinct — this is all about LINUX.
I think Linux is only part of the wanting to rebrand the computers.
Linux was the big push when the netbook craze started as well (and the press was all over that too). I think the consumer is going to be a larger factor, and that’s something that the tech press often ignores when they get all starry eyed.
Unless someone makes a version of Linux that’s very consumer friendly, they’ll hit that same wall.
As a side note, this is a market Apple should already be in. Even if their version of the netbook was a little more expensive, I think a lot more consumers would look at that as an alternative, because OSX, like Windows, is a known quantity. Heck, for a lot of people it could be their first Apple machine.
I wouldn’t be surprised if they announced something along these lines next week.
I’m willing to bet dollars to donuts that if Apple does come out with something competitive in the netbook department, within 6 months that space will see roughly the same user percentages as laptops.
No doubt you are right about that last part. About Apple coming out with a network, here’s an interesting fork: EITHER Apple will NOT come out with a netbook next week, OR that so-called ‘netbook’ will be based on iPhone OS rather than vanilla Mac OS X. The reason is that a netbook from Apple would be major news and would swallow up the iPhone 3.0 story, unless it were part of that story.
Seriously, how can this dude blame Microsoft for the general mediocrity of ‘netbook’ marketing?~
I’m not sure that’s what he’s getting at…I think it’s more a case of “Microsoft will suck the soul out of every fun thing on Earth to put it in line with their marketing initiatives.”
Except, of course, the 360. Which is QUITE fun 🙂
So then that alternate interpretation which you just proffered would be *not* blaming Microsoft for the general mediocrity of ‘netbook’ marketing because…?
Either you’ve pulled the wrong quote or something weird happened because you have me at a loss.
Because your statement has me thinking he’s blaming MS for the general mediocrity of netbooks as a whole, today, as opposed to what MS might do to it in the future.
Present/future — interesting I did not catch that distinction.