My goodness, Microsoft is so hip and cool.
They’ve made a video on how to host a Windows 7 Lunch Party. Of course for each of the characters you’ve got representatives of everyone; the nerd (red shirt), the older lady (blue shirt), the younger woman (purple shirt) and the African American (green shirt).
They try and be cool by cutting in and out and zooming the camera around, which really just ends up looking stupid.
One of the hot tips:
“Now, of course the first thing you want to do is install Windows 7.. [All laugh].. Der, der! Make sure you do that a couple of days in advance of the party..”
A few days before, hahaha.. Then it cuts over to a badly dubbed voice as though it’s the same guy continuing with:
“..call customer service if you have any questions..”
“Amateur hour! I’ve got tears in my eyes!”
My favourite quote?
In a lot of ways, you’re just throwing a party with Windows 7 as an honoured guest! Sounds easy, and it is!
“Oh my gosh, well when everyone was there and settled, I led an overview of some of my favourite Windows 7 features. I showed my guest things from two of the Windows 7 orientation videos and it took like ten minutes. Oh you know what was great? It was totally informal, like, everyone just crowded around the computer in the kitchen.”
Finally, it ends up with a deep message to everyone about how Windows 7 is all about you..
My goodness, what a shocker.
One thought on “How to host a Windows 7 Launch Party”
HouseParty are obviously trying to do the “tupperware party” thing with arbitrary products. It’s hard for me to conceive of anyone that doesn’t look at this as a fairly tacky and tasteless way to market any product. It’s astroturfing combined with prostitution, basically.
What this leaves me wondering is who actually buys into this? What do you get if you do? One assumes they supply a list of features to point out and a bunch of sales stuff to say. Does one also get told the technical detail to help solve the inevitable problems with the installation or upgrade (because it’s almost certain that anyone going to this party already has an OS on their machine)? Or are the guests going to be left disappointed as things fail and no-one knows why?
I’m biased, of course, because I’m running a Linux InstallFest tomorrow. But it seems to me that you really need technical people with the know-how to diagnose installation and upgrade problems – and this is recognised as being much harder in Windows compared with Linux – in order to actually run something that succeeds and leaves people happy with what they’ve got. Making it a merely social occasion, I think, sets people up for failure.
Have fun,
Paul