Tuesday, June 10, 2008

Obama: Beneficiary of an extended media coverage

After a tiresome day at work, I decided to finally log into Barack Obama's site and listen to one of his recent speeches. It was a long speech of half an hour. How many of those words will really translate into reality is another matter, but I almost got out of my gloomy end-of-the-day fatigue and got all charged up to write this post.

After listening for more than 30 minutes, it suddenly occurred to me that I should also check out John McCain's site to see what he says. Being an online marketer I was disappointed to see John's site dull and boring with no videos to pick up and see instantly. All I could spot was a series of responses of his campaign advisers to what Obama had said in his speeches.

And yet again all of a sudden it occurred to me that probably John McCain was a disadvantaged candidate in the race for presidency. Why? Because he won the elections far too early to keep making any point against Obama publicly. Whereas Obama had to fight it out with Hillary before getting nominated as Democratic candidate. And that gave him a huge natural advantage of being able to go to places, speak and make a point against McCain and Hillary. On one side it helped him to topple Hillary and on the other bring out his weapon at McCain's.

Beginning from now, Obama can focus on reinforcing what he has been telling the nation, when John will be busy either making a point or reacting to what Obama has said.

In simple words, Obama can be called the beneficiary of an extended media coverage. And John, a natural victim of early victory.

Monday, June 09, 2008

Acrobat Buzzword as seen by a busy marketer

Long back, when my ex-colleague Benoy showed me a new product of Microsoft- Surface, I was really excited. It was a product that I felt like owning. I have felt the same for many other products, but the fad died too soon to be of any recall value. But this was different. It held my attention for too long. And I became its word-of-mouth agent. I was so thrilled by it, I started going to others' computers, cease their keyboard, type the link and ask them to take a look at it. I saw most of them were excited as well. This all the more motivated me to show it to more people.

I am trying the newly launched acrobat buzzword now. In fact I am writing this very draft on the new buzzword document, the online cousin of MS Word. It is not exactly a similar excitement. But surely its more entertaining than Google Word Docs. Haha...what is this? It doesn't recognize its competitor Google, it is underlining it with a red mark. Surely, the makers of the product don't like it.

Well, coming to the buzzword. The first thing I liked is the interface. The sure, confident and fast interface. The color combination is also a cool departure from the Google Docs. The grey-black and white combination on a flash version has always held my attention for long. Well, it doesn't allow the right click short-cut of the keyboard ( is it because it has a Windows symbol...a competitor again!)

But somehow, I have begun to like this. This is my first draft on this. I am not sure if I will keep coming back to this. I started similarly with Google docs, but never came back. The die-hard habit of writing everything on the desktop applications like MS Office is likely to keep me from using this medium extensively. Unless of course, I start traveling around & require to login to retrieve information.

Nevertheless, I must say that all these are building on a infrastructural legacy that Microsoft has already set up. For example, Ctrl+S is for Saving and so on. Microsoft has created an ever lasting entity on which all future operators ( some of them their fiercest competitors!) will build their empires on.

Its been a long time, I haven't posted a thing on my blog ( Oops! It doesn't recognize the word blog! Some lessons on vocabulary will do!). I also just discovered a new product extension for my blog writing...Product Reviews! An accidental glance on the newspaper made me write all this. Not bad yeah!!

Chao.