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Comment by osullivj | Hacker News Reader

I had been planning to replace my faithful 5yr old Samsung Ultrabook with a Dell XPS. But I like the idea of buying from a UK supplier based in Bletchley Park and using a lot of WWII branding. I do need a win32 dev env, but I guess I could run Windows inside a VM.

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> using a lot of WWII branding

Yeah tbh that's the only thing that puts me off a bit. War is war, I'd rather not glorify it; it might be a necessary evil on occasions, but I'd rather not be reminded of that every day. Then again, I'm not British.

Still, I would expect the subset of potential buyers for geeky machines not to massively overlap the nationalistic subset of the British population, so to me it looks like poor marketing overall.

There is so much cultural stuff that appeared because of war. Do you avoid those things as well?

"Cultural stuff" I can choose to consume at will. The tools I use every day for my work, that's another matter.

It's entirely possible to be fond of the branding and still not glorify war

Being British I love the branding, but I am something of a WWII obsessive. WWII, the Battle of Britain, "the few", fight them on the beaches etc is a huge part of national identity in the UK. But it seems to me that WWII flavoured branding could be a huge marketing mistake in the EU territories Station X is targeting: Austria, Belgium, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, and the Netherlands.

Well, Spitfire, I can understand. But Lancaster? Technically awesome as the Lancaster was, I wonder what kind of brand marketing genius wants to their product associated with the firebombing of civilians [1]. Or in the words of Churchill himself, "a serious blotch on the conduct of the Allies in the war".

[1] Not to disparage the dedication to duty, bravery, and sacrifice of the aircrews, roughly 50% of which never made it back. Competing with the German U-boat service for the service with the highest KIA rate, FWIW.

I agree, the branding is off putting. Let's leave nationalism out of computing.

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