If you're not a tech news junkie, you may not know that Microsoft has embarked on a 300 million dollar ad campaign to counter the perception that Windows Vista is a terrible operating system and simply not worth your time. This is the first broadcast commercial in that effort.

What the hell were they thinking? This isn't selling Vista, this is wasting our time.

I usually DVR stuff and skip through the commercials, but I wanted to see what MS and their advertising partners would do to counter Apple's highly effective and very popular Mac vs PCs ads. They haven't done anything. Vista is like a delicious cake? Is that what we're supposed to take away from this? That statement is supposed to make us think that we can do more with less frustration with their flagship OS?

I think the ad is actually very typical of what Microsoft produces for the consumer: react to current trends, make a pale copy of the current leader, and blanket consumers with the product promotion so they think that maybe they should go out and buy it. Except they aren't buying it. There's no compelling reason to buy.

Apple's ads are exceptional in how they humanize not only the simplicity and goal focus of the Mac, but how they humanize the very common frustrations of the Windows user. Having Bill Gates shop at a discount shoe shop doesn't make him like you and me. It makes him look silly and makes the ad waste our time.

Apple's ads are focused on one point in each ad. What was the focus of this?

Apple's ads are visually striking. What made this ad stand out? What made it memorable? Is Microsoft throwing $300 million down the drain? Not like they don't have the money, but c'mon!

Being caught up in the Reality Distortion Field (tm) as projected from live bloggers at Macworld yesterday, I'm mighty impressed that the new 3G iPhone will sell for $199. I currently own an iPhone and I love, love, love it. I've never cared much for cell phones, rarely using mine and seeing them as intrusive devices that people use because they can, not because they should. The iPhone has made me appreciate SMS messaging, geolocation, and the true power of a mobile device. The one thing I hate about my iPhone is the "EDGE" network that provides wireless Internet access. It's painfully slow. It takes me back to 1994 when most of us had 56k connections and we'd gouge our eyeballs out waiting for pages to load.

The 3G iPhone rectifies that major shortcoming. And it has real GPS. And it sells for $199 for the 8GB model (the kind I have now). I'd be a fool not to buy it, right?

That's what I thought, until last night when I read two incredibly annoying facts about the new phone's launch.

1. AT&T will be charging $30/month per iPhone data plan (which is required to use the iPhone), up from the current $20/month.
2. AT&T is not allowing home activation of 3G iPhones via iTunes. All 3G iPhones must be activated in-store. AT&T estimates that this process will take "10-12" minutes per phone.

I can only imagine the utter cluster**** that will be the AT&T stores on July 11 and the days following.

I'm also annoyed that I'm going to now have to shell out $130/month for my and my partner's iPhones — that's the minimum you can pay using the cheapest base plans from AT&T. I'm lucky that I can afford this, but it's an annoyance and reeks of old-school cell phone company fleecing that somehow is OK here in the U.S. but is illegal in the rest of the world.

So maybe I should have titled this post "I'll Be Buying a New iPhone around July 20," because I'll probably still get one. But the asinine decisions made by AT&T about activation and the increase in prices really got my goat. Apple was so careful about controlling the launch of the original iPhone, it's disappointing to see that they ceded so much to AT&T (specifically with the nightmare that will be in-store activation) this time around.

So this is pure conjecture, but it struck me this evening: Could Apple's much-anticipated iPhone SDK in fact be Adobe's AIR (Adobe Integrated Runtime)?

The arguments in favor of this possibility:

• Apple wants an SDK that will protect the core iPhone runtime. Jobs made a very specific point during his announcement of the iPhone SDK that Apple has to make very sure that whatever SDK they release isn't going to allow third-party applications to crash the iPhone. AIR provides a separate runtime for applications that function very much like (at least on a Mac or PC) desktop applications: there's support for file system access, drag and drop from the host operating system, a simple, local database, and more. You can make rich, desktop applications using AIR with a very low likelihood of crashing the host OS.
• Consumers and developers alike have been demanding support for Flash on the iPhone since it launched last year. AIR is built on top of the Flash player (and brings PDF reading support to the table as well), so if AIR is the solution that's chosen, Flash becomes possible/enabled within Safari on the iPhone. That would make a whole lot of people happy.
• The iPhone OS is not the same as Mac OS X. It's not clear that you could compile applications in Objective-C and get them running on the iPhone. AIR lets you write applications in Flex, Flash, or HTML/JavaScript. This is a path that Apple has already begun to push developers down with the initial release of the iPhone, claiming that developers should write Web-based applications.
• Safari is based on WebKit. AIR uses WebKit as its HTML rendering engine.
• Apple has gotten consumers used to taking "Web pages" from Safari in the iPhone and turning them in to icons on the main iPhone screen. They could easily customize Safari on the iPhone to offer the same option when AIR installation badges are discovered on Web pages that users surf to using Safari on the iPhone.
• It's unlikely that Apple would allow third-party developers to tap in to phone functionality even if their SDK isn't based on AIR. That's the domain of AT&T and AT&T, I'm sure, will do everything in their power to control the data and services that relate to phone activity. Of course, if Apple's iPhone SDK is AIR, then third-party developers could write VoIP applications, even those using libraries like Ribbit. I don't think Apple cares about that. AT&T does, but Apple just wants to sell more devices and get people using the Internet with their devices. AT&T ultimately needs Apple and Apple's exclusive agreement with them than Apple needs AT&T.
• Apple will want a secure, controlled way of delivering third-party applications to the iPhone. AIR allows for certificates and digital signing. Adobe plans to have a marketplace for AIR applications, and Apple could use iTunes to do the same thing.
• Just a coincidence: Apple's iPhone SDK is due at the end of February. Adobe have made it quite clear that they're winding down Flex 3 and AIR 1.0 development right now. The timing is interesting.

The arguments against this possibility:

• The more developers who write in Objective-C for the iPhone, the more developers who know Objective-C, and the more developers who could then write for the Mac OS (and any device that runs the Mac OS, including the AppleTV).
• Apple will want a secure, controlled way of delivering third-party applications to the iPhone. Apple will probably use iTunes for this. They wouldn't want anyone else delivering applications to users of the iPhone, as control of the whole experience (from opening the box to making your first call) is critical to their corporate culture. Letting people install applications from any Web page with an AIR install badge would probably not sit too well with them.
• Putting Flash on the iPhone helps bolster the supremacy of Flash Video. Apple has a lot invested in QuickTime, and uses QuickTime to deliver its audio and video content (including anything that plays on an iPod). Apple is banking on broadband connections to deliver HD content anywhere, using MP4 codecs played back within QuickTime. I'm not so sure they're willing to cede that to Adobe by putting Flash on the iPhone.

• The Flash player may be too power consumptive for good performance on the iPhone. I doubt this, because QuickTime decodes video just fine on the iPhone, but it's possible.

I'm sure there are more arguments against this, but it's an interesting possibility.

Comments?

Once again, the good folks at Smashing Magazine have come up with a whole mess o' ideas to make the design of Web apps better. This time, they focus on 45 Excellent Blog Designs. There isn't as much context for each design I would like, but they do have some great examples and push one key idea: it's the attention to small details that makes great design.

It's the same argument that could be made for a lot of things (not just software), but the one technology company that seems to nail this principle (and has done so over and over again for a very long time now) is Apple. One of the things I hear people say when asked why they love their Mac or their iPod is "It's the little things that are nice."

But back to me (and when isn't it about me? After all this is a blog...), maybe it's time to spruce up the old blog design.