Tuesday March 25, 2008

No-one wants to look dumb

Do you like drinks that taste like Pschitt ? Or is your car a Charade ? If so, you may be in the cross hairs target of the new MSN ad campaign.

My first experience of what appears to be the latest in a noble history of brand eroding, unintentionally image-savaging product advertising faux pas happened while I was driving to work on highway 101. I passed a billboard that suggested to me that MSN search could be Sherlock to my Watson.

Recalling Nigel Bruce's charming yet bumbling portrayal of Dr Watson, and the irritatingly pedantic Sherlock Holmes played by Basil Rathbone, I realised something evil was afoot for me with the underlying messaging. Bumbling I have no desire to be, still less the sidekick of a pedant; I wondered why I felt as uncomfortable as if someone I didn't know had just asked to be my friend on facebook.

You'd think playing a poor third in a lucrative search advertising market that can average 5c per search is place which requires you do kick it up a notch or two, so when I got home I made the uncomfortable discovery that what I had experienced was just a small part of a whole family of advertisments based around the concept that using MSN will make me clever.

Problem with the brand building proposition here is the tagline: 'No-one wants to look dumb'. Which may speak to those people who will engage deeply with a brand that suggests they are a) stupid and b) ashamed of it, but to me ? Not so much.

Perhaps MSN hopes to establish a newfound success by embracing those in our world with low self-esteem (and target them with products they might enjoy), and whose highest aspirations are to be informed by a vast corporation not to wear frostwash jeans on a first date.

Some ad campaigns start with the right concept, but have unintented consequences because of poor execution.

I can't even be that kind about this one: MSN wants to make me clever, but its ads are making me smart.



Posted by dannycoward ( Mar 25 2008, 05:31:38 PM PDT ) Permalink Comments [1]

Friday October 19, 2007

Electing the JCP Executive Committee
Any of you who have been involved with any of the Java Platforms for the last 9 years may well have been involved in a Java Specification Request (JSR) or two at some point since that's how we develop APIs for the Java platforms. And any of you who have been involved in a JSR will have noticed that the JCP has an executive body of members of the JCP, called the Executive Committee, who take a vote at various stages of the development of the JSR on how its progressing.

Although the prospect of losing a vote at one of the key stages can be a worrying one, happily most of the time JSRs are in good shape and make it though. For a standards body, the JCP gets things done fairly quickly (oxymoron or miracle ? ), with about an 18 month gestation period for new JSRs, from conception to birth. It still surprises me, therefore, that in what some consider to be a high-speed dash to standardize an API (others a crawl), that there aren't more casualties of the Executive Committee reviews.

The JCP Executive Committee reforms itself on a yearly basis, with some of the seats coming up for grabs each year. One of the interesting parts of this process is the period of open election, where any JCP member can put their name forward for the ballot to be elected to the EC. That's the period we're in right now, so if you're one of the many members of the JCP, you can throw your hat in the ring.


Posted by dannycoward ( Oct 19 2007, 05:12:36 PM PDT ) Permalink

Tuesday October 02, 2007

Consumerizing Java on the Desktop

Heard the early roll of thunder about a project called the 'Consumer JRE' last JavaOne ?

Yesterday it came a step closer to reality: We've released an early access version of an major update to the Java Runtime Environment (JRE) on Windows platforms, specifically focusing on features of the JRE needed by consumer content.

(You may have noticed we're pretty into that these days, and there'll be much more on that over the coming months.)

We're calling this JRE 'Java SE 6 Update N' (just don't get me started on why). This is an Early Access version. Did I mention that already ? Early Access means that its not finished yet: we have more features to add, and more work tuning the ones that are there. In particular, we haven't yet added the JavaKernel work, which radically slims down the initial download of the JRE (you will notice this EA is still a substantial download). Also, we haven't done nearly as much testing on it as we will before its finished, but we figured we'd get it out there. We have a massive test framework for Java SE these days, but none so large as all the Java desktop applications written since 1996.

Here's what's in and what's not in it:-

Feature	Is it in this Early Access Version ?	What's that for ?
Java Quickstarter	Yes !	Making applets and applications start really quickly, first time Java is launched.
Deployment Toolkit	Yes !	Applets can tell which version of the JRE is on the machine they just landed on.
Hardware Acceleration	Yes !	Faster rendering of Swing apps, especially ones using features like translucent windows, using Direct3D on Windows
Nimbus Look and Feel	Yes !	A refreshing new look and feel to add to your choices -  check it out here.
Java Kernel ?	No, but coming soon in the JRE !	Modularizing the JRE into a small initial download, the rest coming down in parallel.
New APIs ?	No new APIs.	This is our implementation of the Java SE 6 platform. So there won't be any new developer APIs until Java SE 7 is done.

There've been a variety of reactions already about this already. Try it yourself and let us know, but you may need paper tissues handy ;).

Posted by dannycoward ( Oct 02 2007, 05:12:15 PM PDT ) Permalink Comments [4]

Wednesday May 30, 2007

Souvenirs from JavaOne 2007

In the wake of JavaOne 2007, here are a couple of souvenirs for those of you who could not make it. As promised, here are my slides for my presentation on Java SE Present and Future, and here is a picture of my Java SE: Ask the Experts BOF.



From left to right: Chet Haase, Lance Anderson, Mark Reinhold, Stanley Ho, Paul Hohensee, Dave Dagastine, Alan Bateman, Andreas Sterbenz and Danny Coward.

My favorite souvenir was the dark horse announcement I made about the Consumer JRE and how it got picked up all over the place.


Posted by dannycoward ( May 30 2007, 12:07:25 PM PDT ) Permalink Comments [3]

Thursday May 10, 2007

JavaOne 2007, Java SE, JavaFX and me

As I mentioned to  about 15,000 of you on Tuesday morning, it really has been a busy year. For myself in particular over the last few months, trying to figure out and select the various pieces of our new focus on consumer technology JavaFX (as you can imagine, given we have been devoted to many masters, this takes and will take some hard work from us) has taken me shamefully away from you, my dear reader.

So in contrast to previous years, when JavaOne has been a maelstrom of activity dwarfing my daily routine, this year its the other way round for me. Not least because, living as I do in San Francisco, I can bike to work this week.

I mentioned on a JavaLobby thread last weekend that I would post out everything I presented at JavaOne. I had a segment in Sun's technical keynote (go Java SE !!!). I'd recommend watching the whole thing here, or if you only want the segment on Java SE (hi mum !), including a great JRuby/NetBeans demo by Charlie and Tor here it is:-




I have to say the above was somewhat terrifying to prepare for. Especially the moment on Sunday when I walked behind the main stage to go update one of the statistics in my talk, you know, expecting someone homely reading a magazine next to an old flickering PC who would be able to help me out. Instead I saw a battery of brightly lit screens, banks of randomly flashing lights and dozens of people seemingly dressed in black Prada gliding wordlessly from station to station, apparently keeping the whole of the Moscone Center, and all the people in it and possibly much of California, humming with efficient serenity.

I also kicked off the Java SE track with a talk on where Java SE is and where its going. It includes a slide detailing the changing face of James over the lifetime of Java, which caused a little ripple of merriment. I'll post that slide deck when I get it back from the JavaOne team.

The number in question I wanted to edit was an update in the number of downloads of JDK 6 since December 11th when we released it. An update including the April 2007 numbers. Which brings the total so far to 2,090,155. This is roughly twice the adoption rate of J2SE 5.0 in its first 5 months.

*Twice* !!

Your eleventh reason to upgrade to Java SE 6 ?

Everyone else is.


Posted by dannycoward ( May 10 2007, 11:04:25 AM PDT ) Permalink Comments [6]