Comment by Lewisham | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Lewisham | Hacker News Reader

Microsoft has a knack for choosing (and approving) the most boneheaded PR stints in the business... do they pay companies for this nonsense or do they just come up with it themselves?

In a nutshell, the campaign is "Watch us humiliate you and the phone you are spending a lot of your hard-earned money on." Why would anyone think that making consumers feel bad is going to lead them to having the warm, fuzzy feelings necessary to buy their product?

Last year's marketing for Windows Phone was awful because it didn't show the phone. Show the phone! It looks great. Tell consumers why they should want it. Not "it does what your phone does, just a bit faster in rigged competitions." Show it working with Xbox. With Hotmail. Show its hubs. "Ever wonder what Dave is doing? On Facebook? On Foursquare? On Twitter? Now you know."

Apple and Google keep knocking their campaigns out the park because they're built on honesty. Microsoft's campaigns are built on gimmicks and bullshit, and it shows.

Absolutely. The idea is just asking for trouble - there will always be at least some dude who feels that he was treaded unfairly and reallies up the internets. Plus I am not sure how important the "speed" factor for most users really is. There are the fuzzy Apples, the Androids of freedom, the business berrys, but I am not sure if speed is an adequate positioning.

Emphasizing speed misses qualities people actually love about Windows Phone 7 by miles. Only someone who is disconnected from or unfamiliar with the product will come up with stuff like that.

There is the stark and fresh design that (independently of whatever merits it might have) makes other mobile operating systems look old. There is the cohesiveness of the experience that even makes iOS look like it doesn’t know what it wants to be. There is the integration with Facebook that makes the phone personal without having to do anything†.

All those are things actual people praised about Windows Phone 7. Not speed in some highly constrained scenarios.

—

† If you use Facebook a lot. This might shock some people on HN, but most people who also can buy a smartphone do.

Can you be more specific? I found Windows Phone 7 to be terrible as in worse than Android, iPhone, and Blackberry bad. The tile interface falls down vary quickly and the app store is a ghost town.

How is WP7 worse than the others? How does the tile interface "fall down"?

There is a lot I don't like about Windows 7 phones but I am going to stick with the tile interface because it's the most obviously bad design.

Smooth scrolling looks cool, but locating something in the middle of a long list is much easier with separate pages. Which is not such a big deal, but tiles take up more space than the old button interface so you don't get to display a lot of them at the same time.

Basicly, 2 tiles wide * 4 tiles tall = at most 8 per tiles page. Sliding up and down one page works fine, but what if you want 17 tiles? you now slide a little and look for what you want to hit which you can't do with muscle memory. Compare with both iPhone and Android which fit 20 apps per page just fine no scrolling required.

As to updates, texts, email, phone calls have value. Knowing what temperature is is right now in two city's at the same time is practically pointless. As in how often do you want this vs. the actual forecast over some period of time?

PS: And I don't say this as someone that hates MS. I am a C# developer, with an MSDN subscription who like a lot of what they have been up to recently. I even liked Vista on good hardware, but I just think there phone OS is terrible.

The "speed" idea came from an older ad campaign which kindof made more sense. It basically said "get off your phone and spend more time with the people around you." So having a quick phone was positioned as a way to be more engaged in life.

Interesting. I can see that working but they would need to hammer that message much more consistently. Plus this should be really hard to get across as most people's experience with the Microsoft brand might be originating from desktop software/OS. And the experiences from that area are most likely contradicting the efforts of developing a "speedmaster" position.

Apparently, Microsoft has apologized, and offered the guy a laptop+phone

http://www.theverge.com/2012/3/26/2903250/microsoft-smoked-b...

Just as bad, all of their exercises seem to draw on some archaic 2008 mentality, where hammering out an SMS on your Blackberry the fastest makes you cool, and the idea of tweeting or posting to Facebook twenty times a day seems like the wave of the future. I can't imagine any of these being selling points.

The great thing about the challenge is that it is a realistic example of something you'd want to do with your phone. Why, I'm planning on visiting two different cities for my next vacation.

... and, of course, you want to be on both cities (on different states) at the same time.

It's handy if you live in a place where the weather at home is significantly different than the weather where you spend a lot of time (Michigan and New York state have this due to the Great Lakes weather patterns).

When I'm sitting at work 20 miles south of my home, it's quite common for my home to be getting a major storm and my work to be bright and sunny. The differences can be more severe on further trips (going to visit my family 150 miles north or south).

But is certainly no measure of phone performance or one phone "smoking" another.

With this I agree. While I think the point of "Windows Phone does things faster" is true for some sets of "faster", "faster" needs to be clearly defined as "not taking up your time" as opposed to actually running faster. "At a glance" might be the correct phrasing, the live tiles show you the information you need without needing to open the app.

That being said, I was merely replying to the OP's assertion that knowing the weather in two places at once isn't a good use case. It's no different than having clocks for two timezones.

Agreed and understandable. For years Microsoft has had to sell product upgrades that weren't needed by most users. There wasn't much new to show so all they've had has been gimmicks, fud, and bs. It's in their marketing DNA at this point.

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