HP Thinks We're All Stupid

I bought two Compaq notebooks this week from Best Buy, to be shipped to our new remote office in Poland.  Yesterday, I was setting them up with all the software our employees would be needing, a job that was made very difficult by all the extraneous crapola HP puts on these notebooks.  In particular, while you're setting the machine up, this incredibly bloated animation starts to play.  It explains this application that HP has (in)conveniently pre-installed that helps monitor the health of the new machine.  Not only does this animation take approximately a month and a half to load up, but there's no "close" or "skip" button until the damned thing is done playing, so you're forced to sit through the entire feature film when you'd rather be doing productive things like installing applications. Then the app itself loads, which takes another month and a half to appear on the screen.  The application window is divided into these little pieces, each of which tells you something about your computer - the status of its battery, how much hard drive space you have left, the assessment of how secure the damned thing is.  While you're watching this thing hog system resources and slow a brand-new machine to a crawl, you also notice that each little section has its own resource-hogging mini-app.  The battery life section loads separately from the security section, etc.  If there was an "I never want to see this application again, and please don't even think about running on startup" checkbox on this thing, I would have checked it within nanoseconds, but no such luck.  This app was among the biggest pieces of bloatware I've ever witnessed - It left me wondering if HP had even considered coding a light widget before moving ahead with this pig.  It was as if they walked the halls at Microsoft, looking for the individuals who porked up Office and then hired them on a weekend contract basis to develop this thing.

The worst part of it was that the animation that praised this application as the patron saint of computer health also reminded new users in glorious marketing-speak that they should use the app every day to check for new offers from HP and its partners.  Another blogger might witness something like this and joke casually that they "threw up a little in their mouth."  Not me.  I full-on projectile vomited.

When are PC manufacturers going to get it through their heads that new PCs aren't a marketing platform for their initiatives (or their partners', for that matter)?  Some of us just want new machines that boot up within a reasonable length of time.  It's gotten to the point where every time I get a new PC, the first thing I do is create a desktop folder called "Detritus," which is where I toss all the desktop shortcuts to "special offers," "free trials" and extraneous apps that no one asked for.

We're not stupid.  We know you get "slotting fees" for putting partners on the desktop.  We know you get paid every time someone converts to a paying subscriber.  But that doesn't mean you can slow new machines to a crawl with all the special offers, HP.  I think next time I'll build the machines myself and buy fresh copies of Vista to install, so I don't get all this junk hogging my precious system resources.

RTFM Redux

My sixth-grade teacher, Ms. Sitver, once gave our class an exercise in following directions.  There were about 20 different steps to it, and she gave it to us with the caveat that we should read the whole exercise from top to bottom before we performed any of the tasks listed within the exercise.  The idea was that anyone who read the whole exercise through before starting would see step #20, which says rather plainly that no one should follow steps #1-19. Steps #1-19 were all silly things, like clap your hands five times or do a little jig next to your desk.  All the folks who read the thing through before starting were sitting at their desks, quietly snickering at the people who were clapping or doing jigs next to their desks.

Lately, I find myself wishing that a lot of the vendors we do business with were in that class.  We send out requests for information on a fairly regular basis to gain market intelligence for our clients, and whenever we do, my staffers find themselves fielding phone calls and e-mails from people who probably wouldn't be asking the questions they're asking if they had taken the time to read through what we've sent them.  Either they're not reading them, or their reading comprehension skills are off a bit.  We'll write something like "Please do not [foo] during the process." and then answer a dozen phone calls from vendors asking whether they should [foo] or not.

Yeah, I know.  Vendors have a lot more complaints about media planning types than we have about vendors.  I just wish we could learn how to communicate more effectively by paying attention to one another.

More Vista Woes

Now that we can't get XP machines from our suppliers anymore, new employees have been getting Vista Business machines.  This has been problematic in so many ways that just thinking about it gives me a headache.  Here's the running list of issues:

1. One employee's Vista laptop, Outlook 2007 works for a bit, then starts throwing off "not implemented" errors on send/receive.  Various forum posts tell me to run Microsoft Office Diagnostics, which I did (twice).  The tool found nothing wrong, but Outlook mysteriously works again (for now).
2. Another employee can't print to the network printer.  We have two other Vista machines that can print to it with no problem.  Near as I can tell, there must be some issue with either Norton or Windows Firewall blocking port traffic.  I've disabled both - still no dice.
3. Vista keeps switching this employee's workgroup to the default "workgroup," which makes it really difficult for her to, say, see the network.
4. Firefox works for a bit, then crashes and refuses to boot, saying something to the effect that it's in the middle of some reinstall operation that never seems to complete.  At least the Internet community is somewhat knowledgable about this one.  Evidently, I shouldn't have committed the unpardonable sin of making Firefox 2.0.0.3 my default browser.  I'm on IE for the time being until issues can be worked out.
5. Adobe Acrobat works fine when I click on a local PDF, but won't run through IE.  I presume this has something to do with all those security tweaks that Microsoft made to IE.
6. BlackBerry desktop is a big bust.  I'm waiting for a compatible version and avoiding plugging the damned thing into my USB ports on my Vista machine.  I charge it in my truck.  No synching until this is worked out.
7. Don't even ask about my iPod.  I've heard the horror stories.  All my music is backed up on my NAS server at home, but it takes at least an hour for all that music to travel over the system bus, much less a USB cable.  I'm having nightmares about Vista corrupting my iPod and forcing a reload of all my tunes, videos, games and podcasts.

The first three are business-critical issues, and they need to be solved right away.  The remainder can be dealt with until software developers finish working out any outstanding compatibility issues.

E-mail Newsletters Much Less Attractive

Over the past few years, we've advised clients to rely less on e-mail newsletters, de-emphasizing the channel in favor of web advertising and other approaches.  The main reason is that the metrics, billing and delivery mechanisms are broken, making e-mail newsletters a much less effective advertising vehicle than they were in the past. First, with respect to delivery, I don't know how many media planners can recommend e-mail newsletters with a clear conscience when Microsoft e-mail clients have been blocking graphics as a default since Outlook 2003.  Many other e-mail clients have tried to deter spammers by blocking graphics, citing the notion that spammers use tracking pixels to determine if their spam campaigns have reached valid e-mail addresses.  Guess what?  Legit e-mail marketers track open rates and valid addresses in pretty much the same way, so the attempt to nail spammers caught legit e-mail marketers and publishers in the crossfire.

Yet, publishers expect media buyers to pay based on the number of e-mails they deploy.  Open rates have plummeted, and it's not uncommon for publishers to come in here and quote open rates of less than 25 percent.  When someone comes in pitching a product that less than a quarter of the audience actually sees, I think three things:

1. How ridiculously silly...
2. The CPM is four times what it should be
3. The reach is a quarter of what it should be

We've had some good successes with text newsletters, and in some cases we've made arrangements with publishers to pay on a CPM for impressions successfully delivered (according to our ad server).  I just can't understand how media buyers and their clients should be expected to pay full price for something that doesn't reach the majority of the people sellers claim it reaches.