On The Road with Vicky Lamburn

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/7028389.stm

Aside from the rather amusing story of how some topless women got onto Mr. Barrett’s USB memory stick and the fact school kids caught a good glimpse of some womens’ bodies; was one quote that I am interested in (the geek in my climbs out!):

It took me probably a second or so to look at it and say: ‘That’s not the Power Point’

So what is a Power Point. A point with power? A powerful point? A chimp saying hello to his neighbour Ned the Elephant?

Shows we live in a Microsoft world. We all knew that anyway but when a slideshow is no longer a slide show but is instead a power point or is PowerPoint; you can see how deeply ingrained it is in the conscious that Microsoft is not a happy coincidence in people’s lives but is a fact that’s there. Alternatives have a very long way to go yet… (Not withstanding the fact that PowerPoint is at presently better in many ways to OpenOffice.org’s Impress–which is decent enough once you get a couple of decent templates to replace the useless two amateur efforts it comes with, not forgetting the PowerPoint 4.0-esque Visual Effects…)

I wrote something on the new Zune yesterday and the blatant, petty, childishness of most comments I came across that were actually now I think about it all from Apple fans. A few Windows users commented they weren’t convinced by the Zune so far but the Windows users didn’t seem to post things like, “LOLZ ZUNE LOOKS LIKE A POO BRICK!!! APPLE OWNZ U!!” Anyway… that’s another matter, I didn’t post it as WordPress managed to lose half of it and by that stage I was like, no more! And switched the laptop off.

Anyway Apple Matter’s has an article from Steven Leigh which details his eight reasons why he feels people aren’t switching the Mac and Mac OS X. It makes for interesting reading though, particularly the lies, Windows Bashing, Vista and Mac Users points.

Anyway for the record until I finish the Zune entry I’m interested by Microsoft offering a good competitor to Apple, not so that they can flatten Apple but so there can be competition, so the consumers (us) get better products because there is something to spur the leader on. But zealotry is one way to switch off any consumer, and there are enough of those when it comes to following anything.