Steven the kid who convinces people to buy Dell

[Undertoad]

I am facinated by the current Dell campaign and its "corporate" spokesperson Steven.

At first, Steven just had to convince one person - Mrs. Lindsey - to buy a Dell for her kid William. As soon as I saw that ad, I knew it would work. It's just one of those things. Quirky, a little weird, a little irritating, but it communicated its pitch perfectly. Get the price point (under $1000) out front - remind people that their kids need computers in the fall - subtlely hint that superstores are crappy places to buy systems - have the parents believe that the "cool" kids, cooler than your kid, are all into Dells.

The cool kids aren't all into Dells. William won't be happy with the system his mom got. The video card won't be good for his games, the onboard sound will be ugly, the monitor will be el-cheapo and he probably won't be able to upgrade any parts easily next year when all his friends have killer boxes.

And the "more tech support awards over the past five years" ? Most of those awards are 3-5 years old.

But never mind, now we have Steven hawking (Stephen Hawking?) in an Xmas hat or looking for change in an old couch, and the magic is gone. It's like Steven NEEDS Wiliam and Mrs. Lindsey to work his magic. Actually, it's more like they realized the original ads worked, and tried to duplicate the quirkyness by just bringing back the quirkiest player.

The original ad, I predicted, would single-handedly rescue the depressed tech industry, doubling Intel's stock price, etc. Dell's stock has gone from 17 up to 27 since the ad started, Intel's from 20 to 33. Of course there's got to be much more than a dumb ad to cause that. And Gateway, the traditional low-price PC maker, had its stock jump from 5 to 10 during the same time frame.

Never mind. I still enjoy Steven, just not as much as before. He's tricky. A little dishonest, a little too calculating. Come to think of it, he had to trick William into wanting a Dell before Mrs. Lindsey, and I'm not sure why he did that. But he's like... maybe the guy who made milk come out of my nose when we sat together at lunch in 10th grade, who maybe went into house painting for a profession because he was too quirky to work anywhere else.

...and this is what happens when Tony can't find anything to do on Tuesday mornings.

To be quite honest, that kid annoys the fuck out of me. I get tired of seeing Dell computers everywhere. I think that they're poorly made. They used to be better, but they seem to have won the war in pricing by removing all quality from their systems. They are not suited to those who really work their computers. But then again, most computers aren't really suited to me.

Anyway. He just irritates me. I can only imagine it being worse in one single way: if he did Nicholas Cage impressions while spinning his ad. God, that would drive me nuts.

[Undertoad]

Yes well. I should work at SAIC which, it seems, would guarantee that I have nothing to do on Tuesday morning... or any other morning or afternoon for that matter.

Sssssssssssssssssssshhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh. Don't spoil the secret

Actually, I have work to do. But I am awful at completing work when I don't feel pressure. So here's what I do:

1) get project
2) set deadline (in this case, it's Thursday)
3) wait until very last minute
4) do project
5) watch as my boss is happy

Now, I do manage to get a lot of work related things done. A lot of it is thinking about how I should best do the project, and taking notes. I take a lot of notes about the software I'm working on. And then I just come back to it, bang out a superior product than the other guy, and it gets delivered to our customer. It's all good. Truth be told, I wish they'd set more unrealistic deadlines for me, so I could be even more productive. But it's all good. They're happy, I'm happy. I put in ~40 hours of actual working time each week. My boss told me "as long as you're on task 80% of the time, I'm happy." Well, I easily meet that, so no problem.

[elSicomoro]

At this point, I'm not sure what to think. I have a brand new Dell at work with Win2K. I don't know how good it is online b/c we have a firewall that blocks our 'net access. I believe it has a P3. Our claim processing software sucks, probably b/c they don't have enough servers running it.

Today, someone set off a virus that caused us to lose Outlook for most of the day. Another one of those viruses that replicates itself through your address book. At least I feel good that I'm the one that noticed it.

[serge]

It never ceases to amaze me that people are still using Outlook.

[Sperlock]

I tend to call it Lookout. Much, much more appropriate.

[tw]

Originally posted by Undertoad
But [Steven]'s like... maybe the guy who made milk come out of my nose when we sat together at lunch in 10th grade, who maybe went into house painting for a profession because he was too quirky to work anywhere else.

I thought he went into house painting because he liked getting high on the job.

[elSicomoro]

Originally posted by serge
It never ceases to amaze me that people are still using Outlook.

For the record, I personally like Outlook for the features it has. But it is gullible as all hell.

[mbpark]

The scary part:

Outlook 2000 SP1 and Outlook XP prevent the virus issue from happening. Outlook 97, 98, and 2000 unpatched do not. Neither does Outlook Express.

That being said:

Outlook is the only way to practically connect to an Exchange server and do collaboration. There are only Exchange and Domino/Notes in that space that have much commercial support. That's the only way that it works.

I've gotten most of the Outlook features working in Evolution and OS X's mail program, because it uses modified IMAP headers . However, meeting requests use those headers and send those as email messages. I guess that's what the $70 add-on does.

Now get me an non-MS exchange-compatible program, and I'll be happy.

Mitch