Breaking Windows

Business 2.0 is a great magazine, every once in a while they have some really entertaining articles. And this one is great! Can you guess that M$ is in there a few times? The best by far for M$ comes in at number 11 "Whiffed pitch No. 2: swiping your competitor's idea and completely screwing it up." Do you remember the botched "Switch" parody they did with a stock photo model and a paid freelance writer? I do, I still have the web page and graphics saved on a zip disk to laugh at from time to tine. I also found it after a little googling. Number 19 is worth a good laugh "I'm 32 and enjoy riding the broom as much as my 7-year-old," This comes from a lady talking about the Mattel Nimbus 2000 Harry Potter broom. Her only complain in an Amazon.com review of the product was "...I wish the batteries didn't run out quite so quickly." Numbers 33, 34, and 35 are given to this one: Outside a Wal-Mart (WMT) in the small town of Geneseo, Ill., a 73-year-old woman buys a newspaper and suddenly finds herself trapped when the door of the news rack slips closed and catches her coat. Unable to wriggle out, she solicits a bystander to enter the Wal-Mart and ask for help. A Wal-Mart employee comes out to explain that she can't assist, citing a policy against tampering with the news rack. Its a 3 parter, read the rest on the site. The employee at first would not put the two quarters needed to open the newspaper case, because the store can't pay refunds for the news rack. Another good M$ one comes in at number 41, when they plastered NY with MSN 8 butterfly-logo decals on traffic signals and sidewalks throughout Manhattan. I remember that, M$ had to remove them all :-P Number 46, Victor's Secret does not dilute the Victoria's Secret trademark - so sais the Supreme Court. OMG there are just too many to laugh at. Check out the article. OK one more, I could not resist, it is about M$. Number 48 - 51 starts out like this: "One question might be, and I'll be as direct as I can be about this, what is .Net? Unlike Windows, where you could say it's a product, it sits in one place, it's got a nice little box. In some senses, it's a very good question." - Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer, at a Microsoft .Net briefing day in July