microsoft will never be cool.

Not too long ago, I read an article in Fast Company about Crispin, Porter and Bogusky being hired to more or less make Microsoft cool. This is a reasonable task, from the outside – one of the most prevalent, powerful, successful companies in the world. The problem is that Microsoft is inherently the antithesis of cool. As evidenced by the recent unveiling of their new Xbox 360 Dashboard project at E3.

This is an important moment in Microsoft history. They’ve finally stopped copying Apple, and started copying Nintendo.

Microsoft wants to be cool, that’s easy to understand. Cool equals new customers. But Microsoft, to me, seems based on a simple premise that’s very hard to pull off. They wait to see what resonates with consumers, and then they remake it, with the benefit of having the most money, the best people, and the largest built in market of users.

This isn’t cool. This is the opposite of cool. And despite the model working in every other aspect of the business, you can't copy someone else's ideas and become cool. No matter how much money, time and talent you invest.

Microsoft buys success by operating on a level above, strategy-wise, from their competitors. But not as a leader or a puppet master. As a very rich, very talented follower.

I feel for CP+B. This is an impossible, endless task.

stop talking about second life.

This slideshow is a great introduction to social media, why there is no option but to care, and what the basic rules are.  I’m not posting it for this reason, however.  I’m posting it because it brings up what so, so many slideshows, articles, and blog posts reference.

Second Life.

There’s nothing wrong with Second Life.  It’s a playground, an interesting way for people to test out ideas, and a virtual world where people get to decide their own identity, own actions, and own morality.

My only problem with Second Life is that I think it’s become more important as something to be trotted out by specialists, journalists, and scared executives, when they want to demonstrate an understanding of the new world media order, than it is as a world or platform.

Social media is normally about projected selves.  There are varying degrees of anonymity and realism, but the general outcome is a projected identity that reflects how the creator wants to be perceived.  When you read a blog, you are reading a blog written both by John Smith, and the guy John Smith wants you to think he is.

This is important, because the guy John Smith wants you to think he is is the guy who buys non-essential products.  Possessions are often social signifiers, and social media puts on display what kind of projected persona, and therefore what signifiers would interest the person making the content.

Second Life is, by and large, different.

Second Life is a fantastical wish fulfillment and exploration tool.  This is probably demonstrated best by the fact that off the bat, everyone can fly.  Wish fulfillment is useful, except when you consider that only realistic wishes get fulfilled.  And while someone might be able to find a servable niche in a virtual society where a hail of digital genitalia greets uninvited corporate presences, no one who operates mostly out of meatspace has yet.

And they keep trying.

People resist the comparison between World of Warcraft and Second Life, saying that SL isn’t about fantasy, or quests, or winning, it’s to explore.  But, other than a massively larger subscriber base, I’d argue from a business standpoint that there are a total of two differences that matter between WoW and SL.

WoW doesn’t let a corporation try to invade a realm that has no use for it, and WoW subscribers all demonstrably have disposable income that they use for entertainment.

Second Life just manages to keep the buzz going by being less easy to categorize.  

a thing of beauty.

Thanks to the wonderful people at CoolHunting, I discovered the work of Jonathan Harris.

Wow. Anyone who knows me knows my obsession with what Angus labeled 'crossreferencillia', or in essence the interrelation of information. There's also a strong current of design related lust in my view of the world, so it should be obvious that I would love this. We Feel Fine, in particular, is beautiful for it's ability to make palpable the mass amount of emotional data that is thrown into the void, mostly to only be seen by a select few.

It's nice that some people remember that information can be art. The Ground War pdf magazine preparations continue, despite driver issues for my ancient digital camera's memory card. I may have to post some of the photos on here, just so someone other than myself can enjoy them. But that's at least a short while in the future.

Unrelated, but from the less than noble corpse of compassionate conservatism, I've been thinking about the label compassionate consumerism. It's far too obvious for me to have coined it, but, it has captivated me as a label.

If I believe that one can't change the world by burning everything down without having a solid plan for afterwards, then, at the moment at least, I am putting my stock in some facet of human nature that can be appealed to in the name of the good of us all. Given my cynicism, I suppose that greed and pride are my current bets on what will come out on top. Compassionate Consumerism (which apparently gets 174,000 returns on google, indicating my lack of originality) is a nicer way of saying that ethics only have a direct say in the running of our world if we make them a matter of status. There's a reason people are willing to pay so much for fair trade coffee, and I have trouble believing even the majority of them are doing it for ethical reasons, instead of the connotation that 'ethical behaviour' has for their perceived personas.

But that's for another day.