On Thu, 21 Apr 2005, Louis Suarez-Potts wrote: [...]
Right now, OOo is sitting rather pretty. We are very successful,
really the "poster child" of open source, and represent a serious alternative, for companies as well as individuals, to MSFT.
[...]
Which reminds me that there will be an overt, loud advertising campaign to last about 15 (18?) months coming out of Redmond, possibly in part to try to counter OOo:
Ina Fried. "Microsoft plans massive Windows ad campaign."
CNET. 2005-04-17.
http://news.com.com/Microsoft+plans+massive+Windows+ad+campaign/2100-1016_3-5674137.html?tag=nefd.acAdvertising is not cheap. So I would interpret the huge expenditure as to how seriously OOo and co. are making progress. I would also interpret it as an indication of an excellent window of opportunity for OOo and the OpenDocument file format or, for that matter, any open standard and any program that uses open standards.
During the campaign 11 countries will be targeted with online, print and television ads. There supposedly 51 television ads, 39 print ads and 250 online ads.
The theme will be to try to play up MS-Windows as the start to many things (presumably besides maintenance, budgeting and security headaches). The ads will have messages like "Start something curious," "Start discovering lost cities" and "Start feeding your brain."
I wonder if it will feature sound bites from 1995 when Gates was still calling the Internet a passing fad and Win95 almost shipped without a TCP/IP stack.
I would speculate that the intention is to generate smoke and noise to distract the public from OOo, Firefox, Linux, Apple and other competing businesses, products or ideas while Longhorn is delayed until an alpha version is close enough to working that it can be pushed out on to the market.
-Lars
Lars Nooden ([EMAIL PROTECTED])
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