Short cuts

Paul Stephens takes a sideways look at the world of IT

Published: 01/11/2009 | Last Revision: 06/07/2010

Party like it’s… Windows 7

People enjoying themselves at a Windows 7 Launch Party (allegedly)

Microsoft may not have things all its own way in the OS market any more, but it’s quickly building an unassailable lead in a new area of dominance, Being Terminally Uncool. Photoshopping an African-American gentleman out of a marketing pic was bad enough (see September issue), but that turned out to be just the warm-up for the main act of the year: Windows 7 Launch Parties. You get the impression that if Apple wanted people to organise parties in their homes to celebrate the launch of OS Y (or XI, or whatever), Steve Jobs would just appear from a cloud, say: “Let there be parties”, and hordes of Californians in white outfits would be putting minimalist snack food on black glass coffee tables before you could say “App Store”. If it was Linux, fat men with beards would agree among themselves to distribute firkins of real ale to the community. If it was Solaris, Jonathan Schwartz would invite the entire world to a party at his house, having checked with Oracle that it was OK first.

Four typical Windows enthusiasts share their party-hosting skills on YouTube.

Microsoft, however, did it the hard and deeply uncool way, advertising for party hosts and ‘encouraging’ its own staff to join in the fun and flog Windows to their neighbours on 22 October. To bribe – sorry, incentivise – people to become hosts, they offered a special Steve Ballmer signed edition of Windows 7 (we kid you not: there really is one), along with a party pack that included one deck of Windows 7 playing cards, a Windows 7 puzzle (how to upgrade from XP, perhaps?), ten Windows 7 tote bags and a pack of Windows 7 napkins. For hosts who were uncertain of how to actually throw a party, there was a training video (see http://bit.ly/2VMogB) which quickly shot to the top of the Most Cringeworthy Motion Pictures Of All Time chart, ending the long reign of Steve Ballmer’s ‘Monkey Boy’ epic in the process. In it, four characters carefully chosen to achieve a perfect balance of gender, age and race (yes, they made sure to include an African-American this time) chat about how they prepare for their Windows 7 launch parties, offering key advice such as “make sure you install Windows 7 a couple of days beforehand” (which doesn’t inspire much confidence about boot times), and how to break the ice with an informal overview of Windows 7 features. If you still hadn’t got it, there were downloadable Host Notes with reminders to thank your customers – sorry, guests - for coming, tips on what to demonstrate in Windows 7 and answers to likely questions (though not to “Isn’t it really just Vista SP3?”) Oddly missing from all these instructions were any on how to provide refreshments for your guests. What’s a few bottles of 3-for-£10 wine though, when you’ve just been given a Steve Ballmer Win 7 signed edition? OK, we admit it – we’re gutted here at Short Cuts because we weren’t invited to any Windows 7 launch parties, and desperate to get our hands on a Steve Ballmer signed edition. Offers, eBay links etcetera, on a postcard please…

PHP Class of the Month

What did Steve really say? Experiment with our sample page to find out!

After being edged off last issue’s Short Cuts page by something involving a picture of Steve Ballmer, our regular pick from the deep well of deployability that is the PHP class library is back – with, coincidentally, something involving a picture of Steve Ballmer. The code comes, like issue 44’s pick, from the keyboard of the enigmatically-named sk89q, and is basically the same idea (text replacement), packaged to look like something completely different, indicating that if sk89q’s coding career doesn’t work out there’s a long and successful one available to him (or her) in marketing. Intelligent Censor aims to rid the online world of rude language, an objective we can only applaud. You prime it with bad words and their acceptable alternatives, feed it some text and it sends you back the sanitised version. The class sports dynamic prefix/suffix handling (% wildcards to you and me), and it’s won a PHP Class Library Innovation Award, so it must be good. Sadly no applications were registered as using the class, but we’ve put that right with one which lets you help an industry icon tone down his utterances. See it, and feed it your own tone-downable input, at www.paulspages.co.uk/hardcopy.

Yaroo!

Another item which got squeezed from the Short Cuts acreage last time was the curious case of Yahoo!, the company which turned down a pot of gold from Microsoft then spent the next year negotiating themselves a far worse deal. The pot, a whopping $43 billion, was somewhat rashly offered by one S Ballmer in a desperate attempt to get Microsoft’s search market share out of single figures. Everyone said Steve was mad, but not as mad as Yahoo! CEO Jerry Yang was to turn it down, leaving Yahoo!’s shareholders too stunned to dump him in time to rescue the deal. Having been let off the hook over the $43 billion business, Ballmer played a tougher hand with Yang’s successor, Carol Bartz. This time there was, er, nothing upfront (not even a signed edition of Windows 7), and while Yahoo! gets to keep its independence and the lion’s share of ad revenue, it doesn’t get to keep its search engine, since Microsoft’s Bing will be doing the actual searching in future (and thus collecting all that priceless user-profiling data). Call us old-fashioned, but we still think of Yahoo as a search company, and without its own search capability it’ll lack the kind of independence that really matters – a point which Microsoft probably won’t overlook when it renegotiates the deal in ten years time. No wonder Steve’s smiling.