Copy by Committee

OK, I’m biased. I’ve been a hardcore mac user for a few years now and just the idea of going back to the UI Siberia that is Windows sends shivers up and down my spine.

Not that I don’t like the big M. I’ve worked for it in the past, I have an Xbox 360 sitting in my living room and I do the vast majority of my work in MS Word (OK, that last bit is more by necessity than choice. If I had a better option that had the Word track changes feature I’d probably jump on it.)

What really bothers about marvelous and monolithic Microsoft is just how massively mediocre most of their marketing is.

I mean, when you’ve got budgets like I know they have and smart, smart people like I know they hire, you’d think you could come up with better work than, well, this.

So, yea. Doesn’t exactly start you salivating, does it? Doesn’t exactly get you ready to cue up at Best Buy for when this long-delayed update finally drops like a bomb on the sky-gazing, fearful world.

How many man hours and millions went into developing the yawn-inducing tag line: “Bringing Clarity to your world”? How many dozens of drafts did that home page copy go through before it limped broken and beaten onto the Vista homepage?

It’s . . . OK, embarrassing is probably the wrong word. But it’s certainly boring. And it’s got the stink of engineers and middle managers and ambitious ladder-climbers who “just want to put their mark on something” and weary, weary creatives who have gotten so used to having their work ripped up and reorganized that they just gave up.

The worst part? With this limp, lazy, no-risk-taking, no-promise-making site, Windows is setting the tone that all of their partners and hangers-on and immitators are going to imitate for years and years to come.

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