Microsoft is a pisser. I once heard you couldn’t work for them unless your IQ was like a zillion. And you had to pass some sort of gnarly logic teaser tests. “If a train is going 60 miles an hour….” Microsoft has spent so much money on marketing over the years one would think they’d know what they’re doing, but my take is they over_think too much. Everything is so complex.
Here’a an example. I read a leaderboard display ad in the business section of NYTimes.com. It read: It’s everybody’s business to think globally. Does your enterprise software know how people really communicate? Ask for people_ready unified communications. (Note the hyphen/underscore). Upon click it took me to not a landing page (a time-tested lubricant for creating action), but to big portal page filled with many choices – 23 in fact. The main choice was an article presented, thankfully, in executive summary form entitled “Working in a blended world.” But I didn’t just leave the world’s greatest newspaper site for an article written by Microsoft, so I moved on. Another choice which seemed "on" the leaderboard message was in the form of a badge which asked “Are you spending your time the right way?” Check out Harvard Business Ideacast. I clicked there and it led me to copy about a productized offering (I think) called Time-Boxing, which actually was somewhat intriguing, but it was way buried and it took forever to find it.
Then I went to read an article on the portal and it offered me a PDF reader of something called .XPS, the Microsoft version of an “enhanced” reader. I clicked on the XPS, out of curiosity, and was asked to download the application. I clicked out using the red “X” and it wouldn’t let me leave. I had to close the window using a "close both tabs?" button. Frustrayshhhhhh.
