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Comment by shaggyfrog | Hacker News Reader

The second screenshot shows a Windows-themed Excel running on a Mac (look at the Aqua scrollbar on the right). I think that would get a lot of second looks from curious passers-by... the opposite of stealthy.

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This isn't meant to stand up to scrutiny (as has already been pointed out). What it is meant to do is generate cred for Diesel, the fashion label gunning for a rebellious image that created (or more accurately paid for the creation of) this. It's mashup-as-advertisement.

This may come as a surprise given the lack of a Disel logo anywhere on the site but this is where something odd happened.

This was available via http://www.bestupidatwork.com/ Now it isn't. Something happened, some kind of dispute or question of ownership and now it's gone but turned up at a different URL. Sans branding.

Either that or two people just happened to make exactly the same tool within a week of each other and one got pulled for some utterly unrelated reason but I'm running with Occam's Razor on this one.

See: http://www.adweek.com/adfreak/diesel-makes-facebook-look-exc... http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2011/06/hide-y...

I think you are overestimating how likely someone is to make note of such a thing when they have no reason to expect a ruse in the first place. This thing isn't meant to stand up to close scrutiny, but rather just quick glances of a screen as you walk by. I'm intimately familiar with the differences between Win7, MacOS and Windows XP UIs, but I'm also fairly sure if I saw that running on someone's desktop, even a Mac or Win7 box, I'd just think "Excel" and not really mentally nitpick based on the verisons of various other things running. Unless I had some other reason to believe something was amiss in the first place, I wouldn't give it enough thought to note the discrepancies and I doubt there are many people out there who would.

For those of you that are convinced you'd still know something is up -- there are also all sorts of reasons why XP Excel running on other systems would be totally legitimate -- could be running in a virtualbox window, could be running in a remote desktop window, etc.

Agreed.

Indeed, and as one other commenter mentioned, it'd be pretty hard to use if your office has already moved up to Win7.

Could have it detect what OS the user has and display the correct version of Excel.

nice thinking seth ;)

we're already 'workin' on it...

I think there aren't many offices that have macs but block fb out even frown upon it

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