Global Nerdy

And to think that it’s Apple that gets associated with the term “Reality Distortion Field”: here’s an internal Microsoft video featuring a faux Bruce Springsteen band singing about how the Vista sales team “saw lots of sales” can expect to see even more now that SP1 is out.

Surprisingly, it’s not the most painful Windows-related musical number in a Microsoft promo video. That honour belongs to “I’m using W-w-windows W-w-windows three-eighty-six” rap in this video (the musical number starts at around 2:19):

While this video wasn’t made by Microsoft and doesn’t have any music, it does feature Windows, cheese and Matthew Perry and Jennifer Aniston. It’s a Windows 95 Guide and it’s groan-a-riffic (sample dialogue: one of Aniston’s line is “Taskbar? Is that anything like a Snickers bar?”).

Here’s part one:

and here’s part two:

Photo courtesy of Miss Fipi Lele.

Creative Labs’ PR nightmare (you can find out more here) continues. Consumerist covers the story in their piece, Creative Sparks Customer Revolt When It Tries To Silence Third-Party Programmer, in which they make the astute observation:

Rule of thumb for bad news in the mainstream media: release it Friday so it’s buried over the weekend. Rule of thumb for the web: don’t infuriate thousands of your customers right before you decide to tune out for 48 hours.

A boycott site has been set up: BoycottCreative.com.

And finally, the Creative Labs forum posting that started it all, Message to Daniel_K, has grown to 171 pages as of this writing, most of it being “I will never buy a Creative Labs product again”-type messages.

As you may have read in this article, Creative Labs have asked a programmer who goes by the handle “Daniel_K” on their forums to remove a thread in which he posted his own software that make features on their older Sound Blaster Audigy cards available under Windows Vista (they work under earlier versions of Windows, but Creative would rather you buy new sound cards for Vista). The forum on which they made this announcement has a whopping 133 pages of comments as of this writing, most of which say “I am never buying a Creative product again.” Let’s see if we can’t bring the count up to 200 pages, people!