What Is This Raw Format, Anyway?

Any design process requires taking a good honest look at things, without regard for being nice or polite. And sometimes it is just plain funny to state the truth.

The Marketeers Present 2007 Office!

Uh, if you haven't heard yet, the, uh, new 2007, uh, Office Beta 2 is, uh, out for download. Now we aren't crazy about the name because we firmly believe in k.i.s.s. And for the non-computer geeksters out there, what we are talking about is, instead of the usual Office 2003 name layout, the Microsoft Marketeers switched the year with the word Office. They really earned their paycheck with that one!

Ok, so now the good stuff. We absolutely love the new Office. We like Vista a lot also, but the new Office is something we are really excited about. You can now save to a .pdf file (could Micro$oft be turning to the Light? Holy Jesus, say it ain't so!). The other thing that has excited us is the layout -- they have completely reworked the program and made it easy and beautiful to use. So it's all hard to, uh, explain, like Billy said, but you should definately check it out.

Dell, You Ignorant Slut!

Have you noticed that as soon as you decide to move in a particular direction, the physical universe sends messages asking, "Do you really mean it?" About 3 weeks ago we posted our thoughts about the Past and the Future. Over the last few years, we have consulted on the purchase of maybe a quarter million dollars worth of servers, workstations, personal computers, and peripherals (most of them Dell). We were Dell resellers and really liked Dell until the last 6 months or so. Their service has gone down and their computer quality seems to be following. The Dell representative we ordered through would change every couple of months because they just kept quitting. There are too many horror stories to tell them all, but to get the general idea you can visit the Dell Hell site. So, after we had enough of dealing with Dell we decided we would no longer resell their computers, but that we would consult with people on purchases if they chose to purchase Dell computers.

So, skip ahead 6 months or so to last week when we were asked for two bids, one for about $10,000.00, another for about $25,000.00. We ran across an article last week talking about the Dell's new head of Customer Service--Dick Hunter (no, we are not kidding that is really his name). After reading this article we were somewhat hopeful that Dell was going away from the Dark Side and attempting to make changes. We started to reconsider selling Dell's as resellers again. So, we emailed John Pitts at Dell and pretty much gave him what we call "raw format" which is just the plain truth and no sugar coating it. We told him that in the past we resold for Dell and that we had become unhappy with their service and how they were doing things so we stopped, but that we wanted to give it another shot and see how it goes. Needless to say we were not wildly enthusiastic about getting Dell quotes, but were open to taking a fresh look at them. We sent John some emails of the computers we wanted quoted and he got back the quotes on a timely basis and then we think we asked one too many questions. We asked him how much standard shipping was and how much of a discount they give their resellers. Well, he never gave us a straight answer on discount and then he gave two conflicting numbers on quotes so we asked another question of which number was right. It turned out that Dell limits promotions to only five computers and we needed a quote on 22 computers. So, it would have been cheaper to order them online (not as a reseller) with five different accounts. Now, we didn't mention that last fact to John, but after we asked him about what discount and shipping charges he called and said that he didn't think we were cut out for his team. We simply said ok. He went on to say that they wanted people who were enthusiastic about their products and we responded that we understood that. He kept talking going on and on and finally we interrupted him and said, "John if you don't want to sell us the computers then that is fine there is nothing else to say." We get that Dell wants people saying good things about their product and they want people excited, but if people are not excited or not saying good things and are giving you a chance to redeem yourself, we think that is worth going for. In short we are back to where we were 6 months ago--we don't like doing business with Dell and we will not do business with Dell in the future.

And this week we met with Mary Carlson and Lori Atkins of Serenity Inc. to discuss marketing possibilities. It sure sounds like the physical universe knocking at the door asking, "Do you really mean it?"

Prints & Booklets

Today the prints and booklets arrived from Jason, so we will figure out a way to get these out to all the folks who were part of the Geek Dinner. The attractive prints by Hugh MacLeod are signed and numbered, and the booklets are titled "Wine Blogging as Marketing Disruption". In a post today at GapingVoid, Hugh asks:

I'm wondering if, how and when this thing is going to scale outside of the blogosphere, into the mainstream, where it needs to eventually end up. Or will it just get stuck in the "Echo Chamber Of Death", like so many other blog-related enterprises?

The Purple Perspective of the Future

Our Purple Shamrocks are doing very well indeed on the west side windows facing Baker Street, as are the Ponytail Palm, Devil's Backbone, Monster Fern, and Little Fern on the south side facing Sixth Street. The Snake Plant, a.k.a. Mother-In-Law's Tongue, is more to the interior, which seems to suit it just fine, thank you very much!

Three doors east down Sixth Street is the administrative office of Serenity Inc., with its purple door. We have been in discussions with Mary Carlson, soon to be Board President, about the possibility of TLCmagic doing some Marketing/Branding/Presence work for them, and there are more discussions to come. Is serenity in our future? It is hard to tell since we are more the Wild and Crazy type!

TLCmagic Bounce When IT Counts

Last December, just for kicks, we did a parody of the Sony: Colour Like No Other commercial. Instead of 250,000 Superballs, we used 25 Purple Beach Balls (part of our Global MicroBranding); instead of San Francisco, CA, we used Mountain Home, AR (part of our Global MicroBrand). We do not know why we did not get it out sooner, but here it is now. Hope you enjoy!