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September 28, 2005
one microsoft way
I just visited some friends who work for the 'Squish. You might remember them; they long ago drowned in Kool Aid any souls they once had. Let's call them Jim and Marceline Jones. Jim and Marceline are one of those curiously smug pairs who've concluded that when they put their IQs of 90 and 80 together, they combine to form one unassailable 170 IQ. Together, they comprise the all-knowing masters of the universe.
Jim, Marceline and I were watching TV when a commercial for the new iPod nano came on. I braced. I needed to.
"WHAT A FUCKING PIECE OF SHIT!" they howled at the screen in unison, so you know they must be right. Their tone is hysterical, scornful, exactly like that of a teenage girl shrieking "SLUT!" at another girl whose only sin is popularity.
"Yeah, go ahead and throw your money away on one," snorted Jim to one of the three HDTVs he uses to watch analog programming.
The commercial shows the credit-card sized Nano in someone's fingertips. It's an impressive bit of engineering.
"The Muvo is smaller than that!" snorts Marceline.
"The what?"
"The Muvo. It's what Apple stole the design from for the Nano."
I know very little about such things, so I held my tongue, but the distinctive odor of MS Bullshit® was definitely wafting through the room. When I got home, I looked them up. I'll be damned if the iPod Nano isn't brazen design theft.
Other things Apple stole:
| iPod Nano | Muvo Slim |
| 3.5 x 1.6 x 0.27 inches | 3.3 x 2.2x 0.3 inches |
| 14 hour battery | 8 hour battery |
| 4000 MB storage | 256 MB storage |
Note how much smaller the Muvo is.
As amazingly irrational and, well, let's face it, made up as these Kool Aid–guzzling cultists' claims are, to really understand the MS culture, you need to understand that even when confronted with facts, they are not dissuaded from their original claims. They just do another shot and 'splain to you why you're stupid.
And this, kids, is why you can't figure out how to even minimize the media player; why your word processor changes every two years even though you were happy with it in 1994; why, say, changing the speaker volume increasingly requires you to read paragraphs upon paragraphs of "inductive" ui and security warnings; why Passport couldn't remember who you are, even through that was its sole function; and why the MS web browser blocks MS web sites as security risks. Because we're so much smarter than you. Here, lemme 'splain to you why you're stupid.
posted by john at 7:11 AM • permalink