Sometimes an astonishing symmetry manifests itself across wildly differing categories of mass marketing phenomena. Consider the resemblances between President Obama and the Microsoft Vista operating system:
1. Backed by a powerful organization (Democratic Party/Microsoft, with a hugely successful earlier product (President Clinton/Windows XP)
2. Delivers a slick, impressive interface (great on photos and videos, with lots of charisma, especially with the Michelle skin/beautiful GUI, with translucent windows)
3. Consumes more resources than its predecessor (more defense spending, more corporate subsidies, more entitlement spending/faster CPU, more powerful graphics card)
4. Doesn’t meet advertised claims (no prosecutions of torturers, no sanctions on crooked businesses, no transparency of government/poor support of existing peripherals, sluggish performance, trouble with legacy applications)
5. Dislike of product increases with growing familiarity (declining poll numbers/shrinking sales)
6. All problems will be fixed in the next release (Obama 2012/Windows 7)
The Obama presidency is remarkably similar to the Vista rollout: a triumph of marketing hype and superficial attractiveness that masks a fundamental deficit of meaningful improvements. Consider that for the last week the world press has been celebrating the fact that the Obamas are BETTER LOOKING than the leaders of Europe. Marketing mission accomplished.
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I’m a Mac user. Much better.
Sorta like Kucinich. Relatively few buyers, but much more reliable.
For when it crashes?
…in 2012. Right now we are just arranging the deck chairs—er–uh—putting he pieces in place for the Real Change in 2012.
And remember, like the folks say, “Keep hope alive!”
and what of Bush? Must be IBM’s torturous OS JCL…
I just got my son a new computer with the XP downgrade. Now I get to install linux on his old one, and then it’ll run faster and more reliably than his new one.
Now if I could only vote for linux to be our president….