'Cross The Breeze

How to please your I.T. Department

August 31, 2009 by Kris Hoet 0 Comments

While cleaning out my little home office this weekend, I just found this A3 paper that was once distributed at Microsoft containing the following tips:

When you call us to have your computer moved, be sure to leave it buried under half a ton of postcards, baby pictures, stuffed animals, dried flowers, bowling trophies and children’s art. We don’t have a life, and we find it deeply moving to catch a fleeting glimpse of yours.
Don’t write anything down. Ever. We can play back the error messages from here.
When an I.T. person says he’s coming right over, go for coffee. That way you won’t be there when we need your password. It’s nothing for us to remember 700 screensaver passwords.
When you call the help desk, state what you want, not what’s keeping you from getting it. We don’t need to know that you can’t get into your mail because your computer won’;t power on at all.
When I.T. support sends you an email with high importance, delete it at once. We’re just testing.
When an I.T. person is eating lunch at his desk, walk right up and spill your guts right out. We exist only to serve.
Send urgent email all in uppercase. The mail server picks it up and flags it as a rush delivery.
When the photocopier doesn’t work, call computer support. There’s electronics in it.
When something’s wrong with your home PC, dump it on an I.T. person’s chair with no name, no phone number and no description of the problem. We love a puzzle.
When an I.T. person tells you that computer screens don’t have cartridges in them, argue. We love a good argument.
When an I.T. person tells you that he’ll be there shortly, reply in a scathing tone of voice: “And just how many weeks do you mean by shortly?”. That motivates us.
When the printer won’t print, re-send the job at least 20 times. Print jobs frequently get sucked into black holes.
When the printer still won’t print after 20 tries, send the job to all 68 printers in the company. One of them is bound to work.
Don’t learn the proper term for anything technical. We know exactly what you mean by “My thingy blew up”.
Don’t use online help. Online help is for wimps.

I’m sure someone copied it from someone else back then (and again…) so maybe nothing new but I still find it a classic worth sharing. Made me smile :)

electronics, fun, other things, technology

classic, department, it, tips, tricks

The egg and the eggplant

August 31, 2009 by Kris Hoet 0 Comments

Found this via Helge Tenno’s blog – quote on media vs social media from my friend Kevin Slavin (Area/Code):

“One way to think about it. It’s like the relationship between media and social media is like the relationship between egg and eggplant. They share just a couple of letters but they’re not in the same taxonomy. That it’s a fundamentally different experience. And that it used to be when you where storytelling, that what you were competing for attention against where other stories. It’s sort of a story competition. And the attention we are competing for now is the attention to each other.”

I didn’t get the chance to meet Helge in person yet, but I find both him and Kevin very inspiring so check them out.

ageofconversation, inspiration, media, quote, social media

areacode, helgetenno, kevinslavin, media, quote, socialmedia

Design fail

August 27, 2009 by Kris Hoet 1 Comment

Just a bit of Thursday morning fun, found this via someone on Facebook (forgot who – sorry for that). Did we ever notice how poorly designed the Star Wars universe really was? ;)

“Blasters. A tactical nightmare: They’re incredibly loud, especially for firing what are essentially light beams. The fire ordnance is so slow it can be dodged, and it comes out as a streak of light that reveals your position to your enemies. Let’s not even go near the idea of light beams being slow enough to dodge; that’s just something you have let go of, or risk insanity.”

More of the same on SciFi Scanner.

design, fun, movies, quote, technology

design, facebook, fail, fun, starwars

Branded virtual clothes spotted in the Xbox Avatar Marketplace. This means you can now buy Adidas, Quicksilver, … gear for your Xbox avatar, great stuff. Before I go any further you need to understand something though. The Xbox avatar used to be a small square icon just like the avatars you see at whatever internet service of choice. Twitter, Friendfeed, … you name it. With the latest release of the Xbox dashboard last year they changed all that for the Xbox though. Avatars now became virtual 3D characters which you could personalize to your own wish, making them look like you as much as possible (or not at all).

That’s all fun and games but the real importance of all this is only showing now with the launch (beta still) of games such as ‘1 vs 100’ in which you literally play the well known tv show on your Xbox against another 100 real people. And you might have guessed it, the game is showing a virtual studio full of avatars of the people playing. The new avatar, a better representation of you and not just a little square anymore. Thus the importance of brands being very valuable in this context.

Today Adidas, Quicksilver (and maybe some others) are present with virtual versions of a part of their real collection. Should this be limited to fashion brands only, sure not. And should it be limited to existing clothes only, sure not. Wouldn’t it be cool if someone actually launches a new collection on the Avatar Marketplace first, I think it would. Yep, we’re definitely only just scratching the surface here – to be continued for sure!

branding, bringtheloveback, games, inspiration, marketing, microsoft, strategy

adidas, avatar, branding, brands, inspiration, quicksilver, xbox

My persona?

August 24, 2009 by Kris Hoet 1 Comment

First things first, Clo explained it best what this is all about:

Personas | Metropath(ologies) | An installation by Aaron Zinmanis "a component of the Metropath(ologies) exhibit, currently on display at the MIT Museum by the Sociable Media Group from the MIT Media Lab. It uses sophisticated natural language processing and the Internet to create a data portrait of one’s aggregated online identity. In short, Personas shows you how the Internet sees you.

Sounded interesting so of course I had to give this one a try. And indeed nice animation while your profile/persona is being created – mine ended with this:

Not sure where ‘religion’ or ‘politics’ is coming from but I suppose everything happens for a reason ;). In the meantime I saw other people I follow create their own Persona Web but then I got curious to see which results it would generate when looking for brands such as Duval Guillaume (the agency I work for), Windows Live, Kinepolis, Marlboro, … etc and then I must say I got kinda disappointed. The results always seem to turn out very similar… almost the same really. Too bad, hope they keep developing because they’re definitely on to something here.

All of this got me thinking though. Wouldn’t it be possible to search on a brand name for blogs, twitter, … etc and then look up the content of the last 10-20 posts and turn that into a word cloud similar to what Wordle creates? I would definitely be interested in seeing the result of that. Let me know when it’s ready ;)

ageofconversation, cloud, community, inspiration, internet, research, tracking

internet, mit, persona, research, wordle

Consumers don’t care about strategy

August 23, 2009 by Kris Hoet 0 Comments

I don’t think there’s another product in tech that is ridiculed as much as Microsoft Bob. Never heard of it? That’s probably for a reason. Kudos to Monica Harrington for ‘confessing’ that she used to work on Bob and for writing a blogpost about it on Todd Bishop’s Microsoft blog. The product might have been a failure, the lessons learned are absolutely worth for everyone to read. Here’s one that stood out for me:

Consumers don’t care about strategy. Corporate customers do because if they’re investing big dollars over many years in a product, they want to know that it will continue to evolve in ways that are beneficial to the organization. In the corporate market, selling a vision is huge. By contrast, selling a vision to consumers is pointless. The key question they want answered is, "Does it make my life better today?"

It reminded me of how we always try to translate what lives in the ‘Meeting Room’ to something that can work in the ‘Living Room’ for all our clients. Make sure you read Monica’s full post, it’s worth it.

bringtheloveback, influence, inspiration, marketing, microsoft, quote, strategy, technology

bob, consumer, microsoft, strategy

Been a while…

August 21, 2009 by Kris Hoet 1 Comment

I know. Over the last few weeks every once in a while someone would ping me or come up to me and ask me if I had stopped blogging, if I had enough of the writing already and moved on. And of course, nobody needed to come up to me to realize the blogging was at a very low (to non existent) pace the last few weeks and months. And like I told the people who asked before I can tell you as well it is not my intention at all to stop blogging.

When you read some of my last blogposts you know my professional life has had a bit of a shake up (to say the least). I rather unexpectedly spent my last day at Microsoft in May, thus was forced to start jobhunting just before summer in what are probably some of the toughest economic conditions out there. And although some interesting leads came in quite rapidly, supported by some of you… it doesn’t really create the right setting to be thinking about much else than work, life and family. There were some things at that time I did want blog about but they were to closely related to the job interviews, so I decided against doing so.

Luckily for me I found a new home at Duval Guillaume where I was offered the right new challenge in what interests me most thinking about communication in all it’s forms. Next to offering me the right new challenge, DG also offered me a lot of work :) hence why getting back to blogging wasn’t on my immediate agenda either. Always when you start at a new company it takes you about 100 days to get to know ‘how they roll’ and how you can become a part of it. I’m exactly in the middle of that right now and it’s pretty interesting so hopefully I can share some of that during the coming weeks as well. Last but not least they’re all good people as well so it doesn’t feel like I’m alone in this either.

And let’s not forget it’s summertime so I’ve been on holiday for a while as well (like all of you I suppose), first to Umbria where I had one of the most enjoyable family holidays and just last week I went to the Provence for a few days with friends to climb Mont Ventoux with the racing bicycle, another memorable event :)

Does this mean I’m back? Well kinda. I still enjoy blogging etc. a lot but time will always be an important in making this happen. I used to write most of my posts the last few months and years while on travel for work, something I don’t really do anymore right now. Suffice to say I need to rethink when is the best time to write. I do think about a lot of posts I want to write while driving to work, but that’s kinda like playing air-guitar… nothing really happens in the end ;). I also want to change my blog to a more central place of everything I share online and not just lengthy blogposts: favorite videos on Youtube, links on Delicious, … you know the story. I have an idea of what I want to do to change this, now someone need to tell me it’s possible. Let me know if you can be that one!

blogging, community, social media

blog, cycling, duvalguillaume, job, jobhunt, krishoet, microsoft, twitter, ventoux