Tuesday 29 September 2009

It offendeth mine eyes! (And pretty much everything else)

I suspect the following video will either make you laugh until it hurts, or make you want to punch your own eyeballs for so carelessly allowing you to view such highly concentrated awfulness in the first place. In other words, yes, that's right, it's new Microsoft advert time:


If you watch hard enough you can almost see them desperately, popping their happy pills.* But you do wonder if that's part of the strategy: make such throat-burningly sickly and preposterous ads that sheer incredulity alone will drive it viral. It's not as if this a first offence. Witness, for example, the ad for Microsoft Songsmith:



They can't have thought that was a good idea. Surely? The little girl's laptop is even a Mac.

But if people like me are posting these dreadful things, however disparagingly, is it actually a brilliant strategy? Or are so many of us just so tied into Microsoft products that their marketing can produce any old glossy dreck and still sell the product? I wish I knew. Either way, though, if anyone knows a good cult deprogrammer, you know where to send them.

In other Microsoft news

Microsoft's free anti-virus software is available to download, as of today.

So that's good. A few security gaps will be filled, for some. And best of all every copy comes with a free soundtrack: the distant gleeful cackling of the world's virus makers.

Because that's what's going to happen, isn't it? Surely, every malicious hacker worth the name will be competing to crack Microsoft Security Essentials first - and indeed the one to crack it the most conspicuously. It might be brilliant against present threats, but who knows what attacks will be coming its way?

Frankly, I'd rather not find out.

On which note, if it's free you're after, and you hate all those pop-ups and slowdowns that seem to come with every other anti-virus - in some ways an anti-virus can be almost as annoying and controlling as an actual virus - this Panda Cloud thing sounds an unusually hassle-free and uninvasive solution - and better still, it's starting to get some very good reviews...

*Pause at 3:38 to see their true inner terror (you have to catch just the right frame, though, just a fraction before it hits 3:39).

No comments: