Say you are a multi-national corporation and you want to dip into some of all those natural resources and that yummy trans-national cash.
You find, though, that you are facing ethical and legal challenges presented by the countries and jurisdictions in which you want to do businsess. And — more often than not — you answer in a way that, however ethically compromised, keeps the cash flow flowing.
Get a load of this.
I am a PC guy working in a MAC-heavy environment. I love PCs. But these MAC users are people skilled in digital media and new technologies who use it for a whole host of impeccably argued reasons. I mean, I work with people who actually futz with the inside and outside of their machine and write code.
Cool code-writers!
These are also people who know why — in exquisite detail — they don’t use a PC running on Windows.
I immediately thought of them today when I read Randall Stross’s amazing Digital Domain column in the New York Times. (Registration required) It turns out that Microsoft execs not only knew know that VISTA was a lemon, but that they were exchanging brutally frank emails about its mind-boggling lemonishness.
When you have studied and taught about rumor and urban legend, you know that the miasma that is culture and the marketplace often has some pretty weird and ludicrous stuff circulating about various brands and products.
But the noise about a VISTA disaster wasn’t legend, wasn’t rumor. And we know this now precisely because the very stratosphere of the Windows development and sales team was saying it.
MEDIA AND MAYHEM 