Well, this is a first, I think: Google is promoting a consumer electronics device on its front page. Surf over to Google.com right now and you’ll find this pitch plugging Droid, Motorola’s new Android phone: “The Droid is on sale now. Learn more.”
“Want 5 times more 3G coverage? There’s a map for that.” That’s the cheeky slogan of a new Verizon ad reportedly set to debut during tonight’s Monday Night Football game. Riffing on the tagline from Apple’s iPhone commercials, it essentially turns widespread complaints about the quality, coverage and speed of AT&T’s network into one grand Verizon marketing campaign.
If you’re going to claim in an advertisement that Transaction Processing Council benchmarks show that a hybrid Sun-Oracle server runs faster than a competing product from IBM, it’s probably wise to make sure you have the TPC benchmarks to back up your claim. Not if you’re Oracle, though.
Oracle has a message for CIOs concerned about its plans for Sun’s hardware, Solaris and SPARC businesses: Relax. In a full-page ad published in The Wall Street Journal today, the database giant made a very public commitment to all of them.
Looks like News Corp. was a little too optimistic when the company told investors in May that it expected a decline of around 30 percent in fiscal-year-adjusted operating income. Reporting earnings this afternoon, the publisher of The Wall Street Journal and this Web site instead posted a decline of 32.5 percent.
Microsoft COO Kevin Turner must be so disappointed. Remarking on the company’s “PC Hunter” ad campaign last week, Turner said he’d been ebullient when attorneys for Apple called to complain. But now the company has quietly modified the ad in question to address Apple’s complaints.
It’s been well over two years since the $1.65 billion acquisition and Google has yet to truly monetize YouTube. To wit, a report this week from Credit Suisse that predicts YouTube will earn $240 million in revenue in 2009. Which wouldn’t be half bad were it not for the fact that YouTube is on track to lose $470 million in 2009.
In the end, Apple just couldn’t help itself. Microsoft’s new “I’m a PC … and I’ve been made into a stereotype” ad campaign was just too wide and deserving a target. Apple could no more ignore it than Steve Jobs could hold back his pitching arm upon finding Steve Ballmer sitting above the dunk tank at the Santa Clara County Fair.
Investors concerned about Google’s performance in the current economic slump set their Mylanta aside this afternoon after the company reported third-quarter earnings that beat expectations. Excluding one-time items, Google earned $4.92 a share in the third quarter on revenues of $4.04 billion. Analysts had expected earnings of $4.75 a share on revenue of $4.053 billion.
The irony is enough to make your head explode. The latest evolution of Microsoft’s new ad campaign–the one designed to seize back control of the Windows PC image that Apple’s so mercilessly tarred and feathered–wasn’t even made on a PC. It was made on a Mac.
John Paczkowski has been poking fun at the tech industry and the personalities that drive it since 1997. From 1999 to 2007, he wrote the award-winning tech news Web log Good Morning Silicon Valley for the San Jose Mercury News, Silicon Valley's daily newspaper.
Here is a statement of my ethics and coverage policies. It is more than most of you want to know, but, in the age of suspicion of the media, I am laying it all out.
Best video mashup ever.
A Facebook Memorial
Wow.
Worth it for the Rickrolling photo alone.
Excellent.
Flughumor!
… you vacuous, toffee-nosed, malodorous perverts
Stephen Fry and zoologist Mark Carwardine meet the kakapo — a fat, flightless and very randy rare parrot.
Spectacular in the bellowing Russian sailor sense of the word …
“If you spell something wrong on your insurance claim, do you really deserve surgery? I don’t think so …”
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