[HalloweenDocument12]

Check out the number of views on the Scroogled videos.

http://www.youtube.c.../ScroogledTruth

Microsoft is awful at marketing. Less than 36,000 channel views and barely over 100 subscribers. I could do a better job with their YouTube marketing and I don't really know what I'm doing. I wonder how much money they dumped into this to reach the same number of people serviced by a podunk TV station.

[Formfiller]

At least they know how to operate the botz.

The petition is reaching 80.000 "signatures" any minute now.

[Formfiller]

Cool, it's going again at 100 SPM (Signatures Per Minute).

[HalloweenDocument12]

Even Microsoft's main channel is lame:

http://www.youtube.com/user/microsoft

128,888 subscribers and 5,966,850 views since Feb 12, 2006. The number of subscribers compared to views is suspicious. Even if it's an honest number, it still means the channel gets extremely low click-through.

Compare it to Google's:

http://www.youtube.com/user/Google

1,231,430 subscribers, 686,722,272 views. Wow! Google's channel is boring, too.

Apple's channel sucks, too, but it's just a dumping ground for their TV spots:

http://www.youtube.com/user/Apple

1,041,982 subscribers, 37,238,727 views. Note their click-through rate is even worse than Microsoft's. As sharp as Apple's marketing is, their channel is shockingly underutilized. Google is the only one that gets it even close to right.

To keep this on topic, one of the things Microsoft needed to do to "out cool" Apple and Google with the hipster crowd was to make their YouTube traffic look like Google's. As it is, they're beat handily by a blender company:

http://www.youtube.com/user/Blendtec

Surely Microsoft has stuff that competes with blenders.

[Formfiller]

HalloweenDocument12, on 22 February 2013 - 03:22 PM, said:

Microsoft is awful at marketing.

I love it that they insert their desperately-wanting-to-be-cool product (Surface) into a negative campaign. That guy in the "don't get scroogled" video gets scroogled while using a surface. The surface is also abused in this leaflet:

http://www.scroogled...Infographic.jpg

The facebook page of this effort and the comments are a thing of beauty:

https://www.facebook.../scroogledtruth

I must admit though that the "skr-oo-gulld" sound file on their homepage is somewhat addicting. I just like to click on that thing.

This post has been edited by Formfiller: 22 February 2013 - 03:55 PM

[jaclaz]

Candidates for the batch #78000÷80000 are:

Quote

# 79,207
12:31, Feb 22, Mrs. noreen sweeney, Ireland
the government need to get their finger out, and help all the young children in ireland.to raise the money for 2 implants needed.

Quote

# 79,077
12:18, Feb 22, Ms. Anna Daleckaia, Russian Federation
it is not normal! dogs that is best friends of people

And the winner is:

Quote

# 78,508
11:22, Feb 22, Amit Marwaha, United Kingdom
I was caught up in the mental health system for ages and moved all around and Charlie should be discharged and loads more in institutions.

jaclaz

[Formfiller]

LOL, now that the botz have reached 80,000 signatures, they have set the signature goal to 100,000! This all really makes their "60 Million Windows 8 licenses sold" even more solid, don't ya think?

This post has been edited by Formfiller: 22 February 2013 - 04:02 PM

[HalloweenDocument12]

Formfiller, on 22 February 2013 - 05:05 AM, said:

Quote

Microsoft launched the Windows 8-exclusive version of its MSN website a few days before the official launch of Windows 8 itself in late October. Microsoft said it created the Windows 8 version to load much faster under Internet Explorer 10 compared to older versions of the site.

But just how much faster is the new MSN on Windows 8 compared to other competing sites such as AOL, Yahoo and others? Today, Microsoft said that it decided to commission an outside independent study on the matter and recruited Principal Technologies to handle the work.

The study's results show that not only does MSN on Windows 8 load more than six times faster on IE10 compared to older versions of the site, but that it loads up to 10 times faster than competing sites. Microsoft says, "Because Internet Explorer 10 was designed to take advantage of the system architecture of Windows 8, rendering complex page layouts and high resolution images is faster and more fluidly."

The study also breaks down how specific MSN hub pages for topics like News, Sports and others load on Windows 8 compared to other sites. For example, the study claims that MSN's news page on Windows 8 loads up 1.91 times faster than CNN.com, 4.03 percent than the Huffington Post and 6.58 times faster than ABCNews' website

What about sports? MSN's sports section for Windows 8 loads 7.46 times faster than The Sporting News, 9.24 times faster than ESPN and 10.02 times faster than Yahoo Sports, according to the study.

Who the heck cares?

Did I miss something or did I step into 1997 where we actually cared about website performance on our Pentium 1s with 24 MB RAM and 28.8 kilobaud modems? Where are the results for Lycos, Webcrawler, and Excite? Does IE 10 have anything to make Geocities sites stop blinking?

Don't get me wrong, things should load faster with technology improvements but there's no way anyone is switching platforms to get a faster loading version of MSN, which no one uses.

It's telling that results were explained in percentages rather than in absolute units of time. How long is this in seconds? Did the clock stop at the point where one could start reading the page or did we wait until all elements finished loading? The linked PDF does give the answer, but you can see why they're using percentages when the answers are exciting like "2 seconds saved". They're using an AMD E2-3000M as a testbed, which is roughly equivalent to a Core2, and 2 GB RAM. With a more powerful computer those multiple seconds would rapidly become imperceptible fractions of seconds.

EDIT: referenced CPU benchmarks and changed language for accuracy.

This post has been edited by HalloweenDocument12: 22 February 2013 - 04:19 PM

[Formfiller]

HalloweenDocument12, on 22 February 2013 - 04:05 PM, said:

Did I miss something or did I step into 1997 where we actually cared about website performance on our Pentium 1s with 24 MB RAM and 28.8 kilobaud modems? Where are the results for Lycos, Webcrawler, and Excite? Does IE 10 have anything to make Geocities sites stop blinking?

You've got to admit that they take their retro approach seriously.








Soon they will release a benchmark showing that Windows 8 is much faster at displaying 16-bit color graphics than ANY OS in the market.

[JorgeA]

Formfiller, on 22 February 2013 - 04:15 PM, said:

Soon they will release a benchmark showing that Windows 8 is much faster at displaying 16-bit color graphics than ANY OS in the market.

Loved that parody ad, BTW.

--JorgeA

[JorgeA]

jaclaz, on 22 February 2013 - 12:17 PM, said:

JorgeA, on 22 February 2013 - 11:58 AM, said:

It will die a natural death when there's nothing more left to say -- please, don't euthanize it!!

Hmmm.



Maybe we could start a petition here :
http://www.thepetitionsite.com/

"Please don't cannibalize this poor thread on MSFN"

I guess an initial target of 180 signatures could be adequate.

If we can borrow MSFT's bots, we can get that target to quickly grow to 18,000.

--JorgeA

[JorgeA]

ciHnoN, on 22 February 2013 - 10:02 AM, said:

Yes, as Formfiller said, please don't touch this thread. This is the soul reason I joined MSFN and donated money to it. Do NOT split this thread. Although the subjects varies in this thread, it has become a very important thread. Splitting it into 100 different subjects or closing it will only confuse people and we will lose valuable information all gathered in one place.


I personally find MSFN already highly confusing and splitted into way too many subjects frankly.

I know you mean well but this specific thread has become way too important now.

So please, keep it running.

+100 !!!

--JorgeA

[HalloweenDocument12]

The best part of that parody is the use of the Windows 1 font for the transition cards. Great touch.

If my opinion matters, I would likely cease visiting were this topic shut down. At this point, this thread is effectively a sub-forum. I was reading along for weeks before I decided to join. While discussion isn't on-topic with the thread title, it is consistent within itself, if that makes any sense. What happened is that "deeper analysis" lead to spilling over from Windows 8 to Microsoft's current corporate strategy, how they got there, and where they are likely to go. Reading the topic for some time, it has flowed naturally, which I think is much of the appeal.

[Formfiller]

The original article is even better:

http://msnblog.msn.c...23-24194a392342

Americans Lose Nearly a Full Day per Year Waiting for Web Pages to Load

Lots of Americans are still on a Pentum 60? I hope they run an OS with FDIV fix.

Quote

Research shows MSN on Windows 8 is more than 4 times faster, on average, than leading news and information sites

"Portal sites are the future".

Quote

The web today is more than just static pages, it’s loaded with rich video, photos, graphics, and audio that elicits the need for speed.

Web browsers can display graphics now? Maybe I should upgrade to that Netscape thing everyone is talking about on usenet..

Quote

We suspected that people would be even more sensitive to page latency on touch-enabled tablets running Windows 8

Is that statement pro W8 or anti W8?

Quote

and we saw a unique opportunity to build a faster, more modern site using the features available in Internet Explorer 10 and Windows 8

Which would that be?!

Quote

Because Internet Explorer 10 was designed to take advantage of the system architecture of Windows 8, rendering complex page layouts and high resolution images is faster and more fluidly. That’s why load times for MSN for Windows 8 are more than four times faster on average than other leading news and information sites.

Wait, if rendering complex page layouts is faster now in general with IE 10, why would "the new MSN" profit from that so much? That page is LESS complex (screenshot) in layout due to the metro design than the sites they compare it with (ESPN, CNN). The only reason it's faster is because it's actually SIMPLER than those. But they want to imply it's faster because it's more complex or something!

This post has been edited by Formfiller: 22 February 2013 - 04:55 PM

[jaclaz]

HalloweenDocument12, on 22 February 2013 - 04:39 PM, said:

If my opinion matters, I would likely cease visiting were this topic shut down.

Well, besides the issue about your opinion mattering or not , you may realize how we could set up a petition to actually split this thread to the sole scope of having you cease visiting.

"Sign this petition to have MSFN mods split the abnormally long and substantially OT topic into n threads AND get rid of HalloweenDocument12 as collateral damage"



About the "speed test", the actual study (page 18):
http://www.principle...dtime_1112.pdf.
fails to provide the actual script that was used.
For all we know httpwatchscript.psl could contain (WARNING: PseudoCode):

IF NOT %siteurl% CONTAINS "msn.com" SLEEP %random%*200

It's BTW interesting (still page 18) how:

Quote

Note: we conducted 10-run iterations of the test at three different times of day to reflect varying Web traffic conditions.
The times of day were morning and afternoon of November 15 and 16, 2012.

Which can be easily re-written as:

Quote

Note: we conducted 10-run iterations of the test at 3 (three) different times of day to reflect varying Web traffic conditions.
The times of day were:

• morning and
  
• afternoon

of November 15 and 16, 2012.

OR as:

Quote

Note: we conducted 10-run iterations of the test at 3 (three) different times of day to reflect varying Web traffic conditions.
The times of day were:

• morning of November 15, 2012.
  
• afternoon of November 15, 2012.
  
• morning of November 16, 2012.
  
• afternoon of November 16, 2012.

jaclaz

[Formfiller]

jaclaz, on 22 February 2013 - 05:09 PM, said:

http://www.principle...dtime_1112.pdf.

Page 2 quotes Jakob - "W8 is terrible" - Nielsen!

[CharlotteTheHarlot]

JorgeA, on 22 February 2013 - 11:58 AM, said:

Tripredacus, on 22 February 2013 - 08:49 AM, said:

JFYI, this topic has outgrown its original purpose and has become a catch-all for various related news articles and reactions/discussions. I will leave it open for now, but its life is running out.

But that's precisely what's great about this wild and woolly thread!

It certainly has developed over time. Because Microsoft insists on foisting the same uniform UI on users of all of its devices, what started as a critique of Windows 8 specifically grew out to WOA/RT and the Windows Phone, and from there has come to (also, but not only) encompass what's wrong with Microsoft. If the topics get split off mandatorily, they will each become that much less prominent.

Not to mention the fact that this thread is a running time-capsule snapshot-in-time of the Windows 8 and Metro Beta2 >> RTM >> Oblivion chronology.

It really is a good use of the concept of forum "threads", being able to later traverse past events as they happened. Not all threads need to be focused and closed or "solved", having 99% of them managed that way is fine, but not all.

The only thing I regret is that "First Impressions" and "Deeper Impressions" weren't one continuous flow, perhaps just "Impressions". But that horse left the barn long ago!

jaclaz, on 22 February 2013 - 12:17 PM, said:

Hmmm.



Maybe we could start a petition here :
http://www.thepetitionsite.com/

"Please don't cannibalize this poor thread on MSFN"

I guess an initial target of 180 signatures could be adequate.

Now that's funny right there!

[CharlotteTheHarlot]

Formfiller, on 22 February 2013 - 04:15 PM, said:

I can honestly say that the Windows 1.0x logo is much more attractive than Windows Code Blue.

[HalloweenDocument12]

Formfiller, on 22 February 2013 - 04:51 PM, said:

Wait, if rendering complex page layouts is faster now in general with IE 10, why would "the new MSN" profit from that so much? That page is LESS complex (screenshot) in layout due to the metro design than the sites they compare it with (ESPN, CNN). The only reason it's faster is because it's actually SIMPLER than those. But they want to imply it's faster because it's more complex or something!

Hm, I hadn't actually seen the MSN page. The article thumbnail is too small. MSN8 has the same information density problems as Windows 8 and Office 2013. Not a surprise I guess. Without borders, it's hard on the eye to determine flow. There's not enough text on the screen to make obvious "blocks", and it's not justified which exasperates the problem.

jaclaz, on 22 February 2013 - 05:09 PM, said:

"Sign this petition to have MSFN mods split the abnormally long and substantially OT topic into n threads AND get rid of HalloweenDocument12 as collateral damage"

Then you won't have Nixon to kick around anymore. Do you really want Gerald Ford?

jaclaz, on 22 February 2013 - 05:09 PM, said:

About the "speed test", the actual study (page 18):
http://www.principle...dtime_1112.pdf.
fails to provide the actual script that was used.
For all we know httpwatchscript.psl could contain (WARNING: PseudoCode):

IF NOT %siteurl% CONTAINS "msn.com" SLEEP %random%*200

On the topic, why'd they use PowerShell? I thought it was supposed to be an independent study. Is PowerShell really the best tool for the job?

[JorgeA]

HalloweenDocument12, on 22 February 2013 - 04:39 PM, said:

If my opinion matters, I would likely cease visiting were this topic shut down. At this point, this thread is effectively a sub-forum. I was reading along for weeks before I decided to join. While discussion isn't on-topic with the thread title, it is consistent within itself, if that makes any sense. What happened is that "deeper analysis" lead to spilling over from Windows 8 to Microsoft's current corporate strategy, how they got there, and where they are likely to go. Reading the topic for some time, it has flowed naturally, which I think is much of the appeal.

Well, I for one wouldn't want to see you drop out, you're one of the new players who've reinvigorated the thread with additional perspectives (sorry for not including you on the list earlier, I suspected that it wasn't complete and I was in a rush).

--JorgeA