This blog is not dead, it is merely in a coma. It will be back, once I manage to understand this fictitious, purely imaginary and wholly misleading concept called work-life balance. Seriously, work-life balance should be placed right up there along with the Holy Grail, the Loch Ness Monster and the Road to El Dorado.
On a side note, I am hopelessly in love with the city of Istanbul.
So I was in England for the last 4-5 weeks, attending a training programme with HSBC Bank (where I’m going to start working very soon). I was based in a huge training campus in a tiny but charming village-town-thingy called Bricket Wood. Its about 90 minutes away from London, so it wasn’t a completely hermit-like existence. But I did get to see the country from a different perspective, the “real” England, if you will. Here are five things you probably would not know about the country…
1. I think London has the largest number of restaurants per square kilometer in the world. If there are ten shops on a street, at least eight of them will be eating joints. Nowhere else in the world will you find a street with Ethiopian, Russian, Paraguayan and Bangladeshi restaurants right next to each other. Its true, and this wasn’t in the Soho area. It was a shady looking by-lane in one of the suburbs. St. Albans, which was the nearest town to where I was based, has 11 Indian restaurants (on that note, refer to point 5).
2. On the topic of food, nowhere else in the world can you have a meal of potato salad, potato and broccoli soup, potato-onion croissant with jacket potatoes, and a sweet potato pudding to finish. I bullshit you not, the cafeteria lady served me this meal with a straight face. Its called British food, apparently.
3. I visited the unimaginatively named “Lake District”, which was officially voted the most beautiful place in the U.K. Its nothing special, and I now realize why Britishers love the natural beauty in India. Give them a place with a few hills surrounding a couple of lakes and they create awards for it.
4. You know how when you see a brown person in a foreign country, you jokingly whisper to your buddy, “We Asians are everywhere!”. Well, its true. Ignore for a moment that in London, when I wanted to ask for directions, I had to wait for ten people to pass by before I found a local. Forget that, maybe it was a coincidence. Even if it happened a couple of times. It got better (or worse). In Bricket Wood, which is a god-forsaken village with a population of less than 500, I telephoned a local cab company. And it turns out that the company was operated by Indians. I phoned a rival company the next time – Bangladeshis. Its awesome, we really are everywhere.
5. I must gripe about food again. If you see a sign proclaiming that an Indian restaurant resides under it, I urge you to treat the sign with the utmost scepticism. 99% of “Indian” restaurants in the U.K. are either Pakistani or Bangla. No offence to either of those countries, but Indian food is different. And I don’t even know the reason, its not like there’s a shortage of Indians there. Sigh, one of life’s great unsolvable mysteries.
It feels good to be complaining blogging again!
I know I’ve said this before, but I also blog at A Comic A Day. I follow loads of web comics (over 80), and I put up one new strip almost everyday, handpicked from aforementioned web comics. And since doing that doesn’t take more than a few minutes, I’ll probably be a lot more regular. So if you’re a fan of comics, do check it out and learn that there is better stuff out there than Xkcd.
In other news, I’m having some visa issues, but everything should get sorted out by tomorrow. And I think I’m getting over my dislike of posting personal information on my blog. Temporarily.
So it begins. The spectre of working life is nigh-unavoidable. I’ll probably be pretty irregular with posts here for the next month or so, until I figure out how to give less time to a bank and more time to myself. The next post will probably be from London, which is where I’ll be based for the next few weeks. Until then.
I’m vociferously anti-Microsoft. They make products that a three-year old could find faults with. They shamelessly copy amazing features right out of Mac OS, somehow manage to turn said features into crap, and give them ridiculous names like Aero. Then they make weird ads about their products providing value for money. And worst of all, they don’t seem to give a rip about the environment. So what’s the latest indiscretion committed by them? Read on.
The Browser for Better Campaign. So Microsoft has tied up with this charity organization called Feeding America, which aims to reduce hunger across the United States. The campaign is simple: for every time Internet Explorer 8 is downloaded, they will donate 8 meals to the organization. It sounds okay right? Yes it does, at face value. I read the fine print and sat back to think for a bit, and the whole idea disgusted me. So here’s what’s wrong with the campaign, in my opinion at least.
1. The Priority
I quote the words of Amy Barzdukas, a director at Microsoft.
Our customers have told us they want to have an impact in the lives of their friends and neighbors. The Browser for the Better campaign is all about making it easy for people to make a real difference. Not only are they contributing to their community, they’re getting a more secure, modern browser designed for the way people browse the Internet today.
First up, that statement is so cliched that it makes me cringe. But when you read it twice, you see that the choice of words really matters. Look at the order of priority in the second sentence. It goes like this: Not only are you making a difference in the community, but you’re also getting a better browser. Compare that with this sentence: Not only are you getting a better browser, but you’re actually making a difference in the community. Do you get my point? This is a statement from a senior Microsoft executive. It suggests that their priority is getting more downloads, not getting food to more people.
2. The Principle
Let me move beyond mere semantics, and look at the principle of the whole campaign. Yes, downloading is a free and easy way to help underprivileged people. But what you’re effectively doing is exploiting the condition of these people to get market penetration for your product. It reeks of something like green-washing, where companies pass off their products as environmentally friends just so that they get publicity. The message sent by the campaign is this: Come, download our browser, because if you don’t, people will go hungry. Its your choice.
Fine, you want to help people, but it is important to do so in a tasteful, sensitive way. Of course, most people will say that it does not matter whether its tasteful or not, as long as people get their food. I still disagree, that is just ruthlessly utilitarian. If the intention and the principle behind the campaign is flawed, then in all probability the execution will be flawed too.
3. The Numbers
This is the clincher. So Microsoft claims they donate 8 meals for every browser download. What is the dollar amount donated per download, you may ask. Its $1.15. Yes, one dollar and fifteen cents. I doubt you would get eight meals for that amount even in sub-Saharan Africa. And it gets even better. Here’s what the fine print says, and I quote verbatim.
Only complete downloads of Windows® Internet Explorer® 8 through browserforthebetter.com from June 8, 2009 through August 8, 2009 qualify for the charitable donation to Feeding America®. Microsoft® is donating $1.15 per download to Feeding America® up to a maximum of $1,000,000.
So the maximum they will donate is a million bucks. Do some quick math and that equates to about 870,000 downloads. Let me give you some perspective. When Firefox 3.0 released, it had 8 million downloads in 24 hours. Internet Explorer has approximately thrice the usage share of Firefox. So even if they have a bad day, we can safely assume that their download rate would be at least the same as Firefox. They’re going to meet their cap of a million bucks in about 3 hours. However, I’m willing to bet their “campaign” will go on much longer. They’ll claim for months that they’re donating food to hungry people, and lap up the publicity, but in truth it will probably be over in a fraction of a day. That disgusts me.
4. The Name!
The Browser for Better Campaign? Seriously? You’re the world’s biggest software company, with some of the most creative minds in the world (apparently), and that’s the best you can do? Oh well, there are some things that you just can’t copy from Apple.
Needless to say, I’m a Mac user.
