Someday soon this will all be someone else's dream

I was watching Steve Ballmer's keynote at CES last night, thinking to myself "This sort of address has its days numbered." My penchant for drama would have me state we're witnessing an empire in decline, but I don't really think that would arrive as news to anyone.

I have a few good close friends who work at Microsoft, and it's a source of endless debate. At the heart of the issue for me is the lack of clear, single-minded purpose, of intent to do anything other than compete. See "compete" isn't a strategy, it's aimless and has you swinging in the direction of anyone who looks like they might do what you do, instead of focussing on the way forward, staring blatantly and openly back infront of you.

A good portion of the talk was spent showing off what other people are going to do with Microsoft's platform, but devices designed in different ways isn't really a sexy story. The compelling work, and in my opinion the jewel in Microsoft's crown (in the same way the Playstation became everything Sony lived for) is the Xbox 360. It is, to my mind, the only space where they are clearly innovating and driving their own path forward, backing it up with an impressive lineup of content. In Xbox they really appear as masters of their own destiny; everywhere else they seem callous, and forever peering over their shoulders at what someone else might be doing.

I highlight Xbox and specifically avoid their much-hyped Project Natal. A tech demo in very controlled environments does not a product make, and having spent a previous life making games for consoles, if the software isn't there to drive the thing when it launches, it simply won't matter. There's also an issue of adoption; I haven't seen recent figures but traditionally the percentage that even owns a second controller is well below 50%; recent success with music-based games requiring plastic guitars and microphones has surely begun changing that behaviour, though thaty category as a whole is starting to wane.

As for other categories, the less said the better. Microsoft needs a new vision, and it being the media centre of the family home is as good a move as any. Your friend and mine Vik twittered this during the keynote:

Agreed Win7 is a popular & well built OS. But as netbooks become more prevalent, is this what customers will want on their machines?

There's an increasingly rapid transition going on to web services and away from non-core applications. A friend who came to visit me in Toronto recently only traveled with his iPhone, saying it negated the need for him to have a laptop with him at all. If we entertain the notion for a moment that that is the start of a larger trend, lauding last year's operating system starts to look less like a success story, and more like a fossil somehow reanimated.

For a brief and fleeting moment I suspect.

If you don't know me by now

[caption id="" align="alignleft" width="262" caption="This is Toad. Toad belongs to Nintendo."][/caption]

I'm working my way through a great article by Marcus Brown, a guy who has clearly been doing this for a while, though I've only just found him. The article, If I Were A Client Today is actually on a blog he was previously writing and now has left behind called The Kaiser Edition where he would write from the point of view of a handful of personas (as far as I can tell, I'm still figuring it out as I'm not actually all that bright).

The piece is part analysis of where we're at in agency-land, part retrospective of his time client-side at either Nintendo or Sony or Microsoft (if he reveals which one I'm not there yet, but I have a hunch based on the litany of characters sporting mushrooms on their heads). One of the more curious revelations thus far is the Internet Department he was hired to be a part of didn't get placed with the Marketing department or the IT guys but in their R&D labs.

This is curious but also brilliant, an early realisation that the Internet and technology in general is good for more than just spitting out new kinds of ads. For me it naturally harks back to Iain Tait's 10 Reasons Digital is Better Than Advertising, in particular his first point in that series, that you don't have to do advertising.

When Iain says advertising there though, what I think he means is you don't have to do something that lacks substance, you can do something with balls, that means something and actually impacts people's businesses long after a campaign has finished. I'm not saying this is unique to digital, Droga 5's Tap Project is evidence it can happen anywhere. But I think there's a greater propensity for it to happen online, it moves things from distinctly separate operations closer to functioning as a single organism - and that's where things are going to get really interesting.

Strategies for success on Facebook

Came across a great post on Facebook applications and why they do or do not succeed. Rodney Rumford uses a recent campaign by Sony to draw attention to mistakes that are easily avoidable. The shameless plug for his own company is a bit much, but if I were in his shoes I would probably do the same!

"Rule Number One: Brands Need To Understand the Facebook Ecosystem & Why Applications Are Successful."

It's short and well worth the read.