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The Next Microsoft

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Re: The Next Microsoft

#211

Post by jarnold »

blhack wrote: post #73

Dear everybody, Are you paying attention? This is how you build a portfolio. Did microsoft ask this person to do this? No. But he did it, and it's brilliant, and now he can put it in his portfolio under "speculative work". And then he gets a job doing this. I can't tell you how many people I talk to (I live in a college town, and frequently go to bars and strike up conversations with people) who just finished, or are…

My first response was-- hum... I should ping this guy and see if he's free for some branding work.

Re: The Next Microsoft

#212

Post by ekianjo »

jiggity wrote: post #105
programminggeek wrote: post #6

This is great. It will never work. A brand has to reflect the culture of how a product is made, sold, experienced, etc... Microsoft is not about simplicity, it's about feature creep. Microsoft sells software and licenses to big companies. Big companies don't want simple, they want value for their money - features! A better brand promise would be Microsoft - It Does Everything! Look at Windows 8. Is it going metro onl…

If this design makes you uneasy and go "But that's not Microsoft!", slap your gut and tell it to listen because that's just the branding talking. Take a step back and recognize that EVERY emotion you feel about Microsoft is arbitrary. Branding is just the mental handle we use to talk about the automatic emotions we get. That is the tough part about branding: it happens unconsciously. It is that surge of instantaneous…

Careful, it's not just about branding. You have to live the brand idea as well, it has to perspire in your products, down to the tiniest detail. Anyone can hire a new brand team, pour millions in TV ads and new copies, but that won't change squat until the products themselves follow the very same idea.

At a company scale such as Microsoft's, true rebranding will take significant time and resources, or they will have to take hard hits first before they realize they have to change something.

As you mentioned in your example, you can rebrand yourself from one day to another and pretend it's the new "you", but you can't move that fast when you have 100 000 employees who have to pull that act at the same time.

Re: The Next Microsoft

#213

Post by bztzt »

ricardobeat wrote: post #135
abhinavsharma wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Though I agree with your general point about Microsoft being hampered by legacy support (but for other reasons such as having 2 UI paradigms of Metro and Windows together), I don't think this is the best example. The everyday user really doesn't care what folder their software is installed to as long as its easily accessible from the desktop/programs.

That is until they need to scavenge and mess around the file system because of a virus, failed uninstall, missing DLL or something. Then they really care.

If that's the problem, what's the better approach to solving it: cleaning up the file system organization, or making it so that those things don't happen and make people mess around with the file system in the first place (e.g. by introducing a declarative isolated application model such as AppX in Windows 8)?

Re: The Next Microsoft

#214

Post by sp332 »

mbreese wrote: post #200
sp332 wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On Disqus, Google+, Facebook, and most other sites supporting "likes", you can see who upvoted your comment. But this site is missing that built-in functionality.

You also can't see the scores of comments you didn't write. What's your point? The way people interact with HN has a way of influencing the comment stream in nuanced ways. Not releasing all of the information about scoring publicly (or even the score) is an experiment about how such things affect the conversation. One may not like it, but the general consensus is that "me too" comments just clutter the conversation a…

You also can't see the scores of comments you didn't write. What's your point?

That is my point. I understand that this site is an experiment, my point is that it doesn't suit every use case. Not everyone agrees with the general consensus all the time.

Re: The Next Microsoft

#215

Post by bztzt »

roc wrote: post #131
thematt wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I used the think the same thing, but it's not clear to me that Microsoft "needs" saving. They're growing the enterprise side of their business quite fast and the problem just seems to be that investors expect them to be the next Apple, whereas Ballmer is turning them into the next IBM. They'll still make boatloads of money on the enterprise side and that'll be enough to keep them floating for decades to come, so I co…

If Ballmer was aiming for the next IBM, he'd have spun off Windows Phone as IBM sold off its PC business. They wouldn't be buying companies and pouring resources into it and pissing off the OEMs by pouring resources into Surface. And if they were just shooting for Enterprise++, keeping Windows Phone and Surface to keep enterprise device sales under their umbrella, they'd be spinning off the XBox and consumer media pr…

They are doing this because they know that today's consumer market = tomorrow's enterprise market.

Re: The Next Microsoft

#216

Post by batiudrami »

brittohalloran wrote: post #120
JackC wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not saying you're wrong, but none of those logos is nearly as simple as this one. For example, I wasn't taught a formula for calculating their area in elementary school. Are there any successful logos that really are this simple?

Yes, you're right, they're slighly more complicated. Hows about these: http://blog.iso50.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/08/windowslive... http://www.findthatlogo.com/wp-content/gallery/pepsi-logos/o... http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_DvlYtL1ReM0/TIHrinS6g5I/AAAAAAAACw... this is even better: http://www.logodesignconsultant.com/images/Memorable-simple-... this is probably the winner though: http://www.petergreenberg.com/wp-con…

Interestingly, the red cross logo is actually a trademark of Johnson & Johnson [1], not the Red Cross. It's also easily confused with the Swiss flag, and Swatch Watches (though granted they have inverted colours). Unless there is some context you wouldn't necessarily know which brand that was referring to. If you remove the colour (as is proposed on the page), it's just a plus sign and not recognisable at all.

[1] http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/1559971/Johnson-an...

Re: The Next Microsoft

#217

Post by mattdeboard »

sjwright wrote: post #89

Allow me to be contrarian for a moment and say I don't like it. It's a nice experiment, and it's better than the new Windows logo, but to me it fails on a few different grounds. -- The typographic mark is less substantial, and the typeface is just poor. The existing logo isn't pretty, but it works just fine, and the arrow device connecting the O and S is cute. -- The use of a lower case "m" is just a slave to a trend…

It's not contrarian when a full half of the top-level commenters say they don't care for it.

And really this seems to me pretty much par for the course for design work here on HN. Every single time someone posts an attempt at some design work that they have taken very seriously, it quickly degrades into a contest to see whom can say "meh" the most dramatically.

Re: The Next Microsoft

#218

Post by bztzt »

pooriaazimi wrote: post #137

What I particularly hate about MS branding right now is those stupid, unnecessary (TM) and (R)'s that follow names of their products... Just look at this picture for God's sake: http://www.minimallyminimal.com/storage/post-images/microsof... or head over to their website: http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/default.aspx It's ridiculous. So "Windows" is a registered trademark of Microsoft. Big deal, but why put it after ev…

They are a database company :)

Re: The Next Microsoft

#219

Post by kposehn »

I was really impressed by this. As nhashem said, "I wanted this company to exist".

The "Mankind's most advanced phone" image was what really did it for me. Here is an extremely talented person who really has vision, with a subtlety to match.

What I wish for the most, is that more people will show their vision in this way. We need to re-imagine like this all the time, otherwise ideas and vision become stale.

And when vision becomes stale, the future becomes mediocre.

Re: The Next Microsoft

#220

Post by wbillingsley »

What I particularly like about this is that it fits with changes Microsoft have already been making (a move to minimalism and a focus on the content and clean lines, with extraneous UI elements normally off-screen and need to be swiped in). So, rather than the spec proposal coming across as an arrogant "About face and do it my way", it comes across as a thoughtful and sympathetic proposal based around their business.
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