'We're public now, so could you please click on an ad or two' This was the week when Facebook stocks took an early drubbing in the market before recovering somewhat to a more stable, albeit reduced, price. The social network wasn't able to find its feet in time to stop a slew of lawsuits from disgruntled investors who jointly and severally blame Facebook, Zuckerberg, the IPO underwriting …
It seems to me that the volte-face on Aero is really a case of Microsoft trying to decide that Apple isn't cool on behalf of the user.
I'm not saying this as an Apple enthusiast, although I am one. I'm undecided as to how much I really like Apple's keenness for interfaces that resemble physical objects (like the Reminders app, iBooks, etc.), but I do think that Microsoft are trying to denounce that approach as passé by dumping on Aero.
Sadly for Redmond, I think that the difference is that Aero is trying to look 'shiny' by being all glass-like, whereas the iOS (and now Mac OS) style of resembling physical objects is about familiarity and simplicity at least as much as it is about gloss and luxury.
But both things can be cheesy.
Indeed. The problem with Aero isn't that faux materials is now out of fashion, it's that Aero was never a very good implementation of faux materials in the first place, and microsoft seem to have trouble hiring good icon artists. It looked cheap, it felt cheap and it ate more screen estate than it should have. I guess Metro is the best answer for MS after all, since you don't need an artist to draw an orange square.
On the question of screen estate, I see with the new file explorer Windows 8 has taken another step towards leaving us with as little space as possible for...well...file listings. Is there any decent way of making an explorer window show ONLY the path and folder contents (and maybe the status bar)? It's bloody annoying when trying to manage lots of directories without resorting to 3rd party software.
... can hang for minutes at a time on Win7 and a lot of people blame Aero as well as Indexing services etc. for taking processor time. I just tell people not to play crappy games or get an xbox but the point remains that Win 7 takes a lot of power to run and as electrical efficiency becomes more of an issue fancy graphics look more and more out of place.
Y'know, I feel I should be appalled and outraged by that crass remark, but instead, I can't stop grinning from ear to ear.
It reminds me of around 1994 or so, when the Web was first being polluted by advertising; even then, there was already a large number of users who were annoyed with the flashing, wiggling, tacky banners assaulting their eyeballs as they tried to seek entertainment, information or news. I distinctly recall news.admin.net-abuse.email and many of the other news.admin.net-abuse.* forums being invaded by pissed-off spammers and other Web hucksters pissing and moaning about how they wouldn't have to do what they were doing "if you people would just click on an ad every once in a while".
Also, as I recall, back then the original Web advertising revenue model was rather flawed -- straight-up pay-per-click, iirc -- and legions of pissed-off Web users were deliberately sabotaging advertisers' business model by repeatedly clicking on ads, driving up the advertisers' costs until many of them had been driven out of business. The marketing and advertising type, predictably, responded to this by whining about how those mean old users had broken their business model.
These days, of course, we hear much of the same bitching from marketroids about people using JavaScript filters and ad blockers. Huh. Stop me if I'm wrong, but aren't sites which accept advertising being paid for running the ads whether the site's audience actually sees the ads on their browser or not?
This kind of whining from Failbook's COO also kind of reminds me of one time about eight or ten years ago, when this marketing/advertising honcho from ABC TV went on the Today Show one morning, looked the whole country in the eye and told us in a flustering, indignant tone that viewers who skipped the commercials were thieves. As with Ms. Sandberg's tacky plea, I damn' near pissed my pants laughing.
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