I know I've complained before that IBM has the worst advertising in the world, but it bears repeating. Seriously, IBM is one of the few companies whose advertisements reach a level of stupidity that truly appalls and offend me.
Here are some more animals that IBM should have made to describe the state of their product:
- An Albatross-> Notes has a huge span of features that makes it unstable and clumsy.
- A White Elephant -> Market share is getting smaller and smaller
- A Pig -> Oink! Oink! I'm eating bandwidth. Oink! Oink! I'm devouring your SAN. Oink! Oink! More processors! More!
- Bigfoot -> BAM! You don't see my footprint on the desktop because you are in the valley left by it.
- The Sphinx -> #08:08 This is not an emoticon, its an error message. I know, it's cryptic, just like the...
- A Sloth -> You want to get through the tangle but this hairy beast just hangs.
- Frankenstein's Monster-> A soulless and malevolent (IMAP non-compliant) reincarnation of parts of bodies long thought dead (PLATO, cc:mail, "@"functions macro language); all accursed. Abandoned in disgust/terror by its creator (Ray Ozzie) and serving as a cautionary tale to others embarking on such hubris-tic quests (Google), such as heading into frozen lifeless wastelands ("blogspot").
Do I actually feel this way about the product? No, and that's the point.
The advertising makes me think up all these cheap-shot complaints, and notwithstanding their validity, these cheap-shot complaints are so pithy and amusing to me that it sticks in my head.
That's bad advertising. Not "so bad its good" but "so bad that the Boards of Directors at both IBM and the ad agency ought to apologize"
Yuck!
