Stephen's Personal Blog

Although I rather like Windows Vista — I think the amount of Vista nerd rage out there is completely unwarranted — there are areas of Vista I find hugely disappointing. And for my money, nothing is more disapponting than the overall fit and finish of Vista, which is truly abysmal. It’s arguably the worst of any operating system Microsoft has ever released.
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You’re never more than two clicks away from some discontinuity or visual gaffe that zaps you right back into the seven year old Windows XP “experience”. Or worse. Consider Chris Pirillo’s observations on his Windows Vista beta 2 install:

Windows Calendar font and icon alignment are all wonky.

The Windows Media toolbar pop-up preview window is using Arial.

Safely Remove Hardware dialog is in Microsoft Sans Serif.

This goes on for about, oh, eleven pages. Granted, these comments refer to the beta, but the shipping version of Vista is every bit as schizophrenic in design. There’s very little consistency.

It also seems every individual team at Microsoft has a profoundly different idea of what the user interface should look like, as Paul Thurrott notes:

And what’s up with the glaringly inconsistent UI across Windows Vista and all of its applications? Some windows have menus, some don’t, and some have hidden menus. Some have these new black toolbars, some don’t. And so on. Why isn’t there a team of people just working on consistency issues?

Aren’t these trivial, nitpicky complaints? Yes. They are. And that’s entirely the point. This little stuff matters.
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Whatever Happened to UI Consistency?

The banana we eat today is not the one your grandparents ate. That one – known as the Gros Michel – was, by all accounts, bigger, tastier, and hardier than the variety we know and love, which is called the Cavendish. The unavailability of the Gros Michel is easily explained: it is virtually extinct.

Introduced to our hemisphere in the late 19th century, the Gros Michel was almost immediately hit by a blight that wiped it out by 1960. The Cavendish was adopted at the last minute by the big banana companies – Chiquita and Dole – because it was resistant to that blight, a fungus known as Panama disease. For the past fifty years, all has been quiet in the banana world. Until now.

Panama disease in Hawaii
Panama disease – or Fusarium wilt of banana – is back, and the Cavendish does not appear to be safe from this new strain, which appeared two decades ago in Malaysia, spread slowly at first, but is now moving at a geometrically quicker pace. There is no cure, and nearly every banana scientist says that though Panama disease has yet to hit the banana crops of Latin America, which feed our hemisphere, the question is not if this will happen, but when. Even worse, the malady has the potential to spread to dozens of other banana varieties, including African bananas, the primary source of nutrition for millions of people.
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Banana: R.I.P.
By Dan Koeppel

This week Viacom (VIA) CEO Philippe Dauman warned Wall Street that ad sales aren’t going well: The 7% growth the company had in the first quarter will be more like 3% to 4% in Q2. Philippe singled out weakness in automotive industry, in addition to the already decimated financial/mortgage business
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Earlier this year, CPG companies like Procter & Gamble (PG), under pressure from their own rising food, commodities and fuel costs, shifted ad planning from an annual to a quarterly basis and making shorter-term ad commitments. That means media companies that could once make reasonable projections for FY revenues now have to update their assumptions every few months. “The planning cycle has changed,” Wenda tells us. “This is wreaking havoc on media company forecasting.”
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http://www.alleyinsider.com/2008/5/cheerios_and_tide_why_media_is_having_trouble_with_ad_forecasts