Microsoft’s Cultural Blunders
CNet has an article up today recounting a speech by Microsoft’s own Tom Edwards, who is the head of their geopolitical strategy team, made on the different little mistakes Microsoft has done that have pissed off a section of the world. For instance Microsoft lost millions when they had to pull back some 200,000 copies of Windows 95 because a section of India (only eight pixels) were colored differently than the rest. The Indian government didn’t like that Microsoft was pointing out the disputed Kashmiri territory and got pissed and, I don’t know…held back the export of Quickie Mart employees and Microsoft had to pull it all back and fix it.
There are more examples of Microsoft missteps, like included a track of people reading the Koran in the soundtrack for a video game or when, in another game, they included Muslim warriors turning churches into mosques. But my personal favorite Microsoft cultural blunder is this one:
Microsoft has also managed to upset women and entire countries. A Spanish-language version of Windows XP, destined for Latin American markets, asked users to select their gender between “not specified,” “male” or “bitch,” because of an unfortunate error in translation.
I can just picture is some old Mexican lady starting up her Windows XP machine (She got it as a gift or something ok!) and when it asks her for her gender she graps her chest and yells out “¡Dios mio!”
The one cultural mishap they failed to mention was when Microsoft inflicted Windows ME upon the earth. Thats gotta be the worst one of all time right?
We Screwed Up: No, There’s Not 2 Different Yahoo! Mail Betas
It was bound to happen eventually. I’m actually surprised it took over 800 posts before it happened…but we finally doubled a post. Two posts about how to get the Yahoo! Mail beta back to back. Whoops! Our bad. Like any good editor, I handled it thusly: I posted a little ahead of Dan so my post stays! So there. ppppppfffffffttttttt! Seriously though, I hope no one is out there linking to the second post because I didn’t feel like taking the time to do a redirect.
To any of you that thought we meant for you to sign up for the beta twice in some fashion, but then you couldn’t because your mail account already had the beta activated which twisted your mind up and while walking outside earlier today your crazed mind thought that you were being attacked by penguins so you grabbed up the nearest stick and began to beat the hell out of the penguins, which was surprisingly easy because you thought that because the penguins were on the offensive that they would be tougher to fight, but come on…they are just penguins. After the battle you thought to yourself that “Man there is enough penguins here to fill a school bus” which seemed like an odd though until you snapped out of the crazed state our double postings put you in and you realized that you just beat the poptarts out of an entire kindergarten class with some stick you found on the ground which you just realized was actually yet another kindergartener, and now you are in jail, we are really sorry.
Hell Yeah Bitch! .com Self Critique
There have been a lot of people posting about Jakob Nielsen’s “Top Ten Design Mistakes”…it must have been a slow news day. Gadgetopia however did a nice little introspective using these guffaws, and I thought that was a pretty good idea. So hold on to your butts because reading this post just might be too exciting for you to handle.
- No Author Biographies We have half of an “about page”…does that get us anything. I have been meaning to, and will, get something more concrete up there for myself. As for Dan and the “Ghost of Joe”, they can do it or not.
- No Author Photo Actually, I’m not sure how many of you noticed, but I just recently fixed this. Not only do we have some stylish black and white photos of us (with the Ghost of Joe being represented by Lindsay Lohan) but that same picture now appears on every post written by us on the archive page. I did that to make the destinction that its not just me writting on this blog stronger. I think it has mostly worked, but I want to do more to that effect.
- Nondescript Posting Titles I think in the recent months we have gotten better about this. My headline tend to have a very strong lean to the comedic side, but for the most part they seem ok.
- Links Don’t Say Where They Go This is a constant sturggle. On the whole I think we do the best we can. I mainly just make sure that we don’t have any “Click Here” links, and if we don’t then I’m happy.
- Classic Hits are Buried I’ve tried to fix this with the “Best of” section on the front page, but that section itself if a bit buried, so we might want to look at that again.
- The Calendar is the Only Navigation I’m pround to say we have NEVER had calander navigation! It sucks. It only works if you are writing a true online diary…anything else and date navigation is useless.
- Irregular Publishing Frequency Other than the weekends, I think we do pretty well on keeping something fresh up here. That being said, I would love to have much more going on here, but for basically two people I think we do ok.
- Mixing Topics We do this. We will always do this. This is basically a website with little to no point, so mixing topics is what we do.
- Forgetting That You Write for Your Future Boss I think as long as I never go to work for Lance Armstrong, I’ll be cool.
- Having a Domain Name Owned by a Weblog Service Not a problem. (Who would want this domain anyway?)
Anything to add?