Following the recent TV ad Google released in the hope of increasing the number of Chrome users across the world, Farhad Manjoo, Slate’s technology columnist, offers the company several useful suggestions. He brings up the fact that an ad as simple as the Chrome one isn’t enough to explain the benefits of a slightly complex product like a web browser. The people who Google needs to target, according to him, are the Firefox fanatics who were glad to switch from Internet Explorer because it reassured them that ‘someone was working to build innovation back into the Web’, given Microsoft’s monopoly [...]

In Slate, Seth Stevenson tears into Microsoft’s dimishing brand strength via Crispin Porter + Bogusky’s recent ads for Microsoft featuring children (like the one below) and JWT’s unimaginative ad for Microsoft’s Quiksilver. He argues that while the ads are bad in themselves (CP+B’s ‘fratty snark’ is apparently not a match for Microsoft’s inherent unhipness and JWT’s ads are ‘even worse than CP+B’s’), the main problem lies in the brand itself. To be fair, Stevenson admits disliking Crispin intensely. Still, he somehow comes out and says about Microsoft what a lot of people perhaps think.
From the article:
According to BusinessWeek, Microsoft [...]

Microsoft’s Photosynth technology originally debuted two years ago, but it continues to impress us with its implications for photography in user generated digital environments.  When the developer, Aguera y Arcas, spoke to the crowd at the 2007 TED conference, he described the Photosynth project as taking “data from the entire collective memory of what the earth looks like…All of those photos become linked together, and they make something emergent—greater than the sum of their parts.”
Photosynth technology was recently seen implemented on a massive scale during the inauguration, when CNN asked viewers to contribute their own photos to create an enormous [...]