scattrbrain

This has to go down in history as one of the dumbest excuses ever made by a company. Apple released some ipods with a windows virus recently. (Speaks a lot about their quality control) They released a public apology in which they partially blamed windows for being susceptible to viruses.

Its preposterous! Just accept the fact that you screwed up and get on with life. It seems the Apple management is run by 5 year olds who can’t take the heat.

Verbatim from the Apple website:

We recently discovered that a small number – less than 1% – of the Video iPods available for purchase after September 12, 2006, left our contract manufacturer carrying the Windows RavMonE.exe virus. This known virus affects only Windows computers, and up to date anti-virus software which is included with most Windows computers should detect and remove it. So far we have seen less than 25 reports concerning this problem. The iPod nano, iPod shuffle and Mac OS X are not affected, and all Video iPods now shipping are virus free. As you might imagine, we are upset at Windows for not being more hardy against such viruses, and even more upset with ourselves for not catching it.

A buddy of mine who works at Microsoft sent this ad. This is the Indian ad for the Xbox 360. Microsoft definitely took a chance on this one. I like the music, the ad is good; I get the ‘Game On’ insinuation. I don’t know if consumers in India will get it though.

Before I get to the point, some background information.

Fact: Most gullible internet users/newbies use the MSN network

The reason for this is that most users on the MSN network are users who don’t know how to change the homepage in their browser (IE) or install software on their PC.

This fact has been exploited by a lot of people. Anybody and everybody who wants to drive gullible traffic to their website(s) advertises on the MSN network. I know some webmasters who are doing very well with this tactic.

These users are not tech savvy but they have heard the buzzwords. Everyone has heard about MySpace

So what does this have to do with MSN misleading their users ?

Take a very careful look at this screenshot.

These users are going to think that this button is the MySpace the whole world is talking about. They will click on this and create an account. Only that this is a MSN Spaces account!

Now the good people at MSN do show a tooltip which says “Get your own space on MSN Spaces” but really, who are they kidding ?

I haven’t seen a more blatant attempt to mislead users to steal market share.

Someone at NewsCorp (MySpace.com’s parent company) should do something about this.

Update

Microsoft released a new version of MSN Messenger where they changed “My Space” to say “My MSN Space”

Thanks to chuck for pointing this out.