Microsoft announces they’ve not yet made an application to read the New York Times. Like a web browser? WTF? “In the coming months”. So Microsoft gets shit from everyone about delaying and delaying products like Vista and now they press release about an application that is months away from release? Meanwhile anyone with Internet Explorer or Firefox can read the paper online anyway. Jarvis is dead right. Two steps back.
Damien Mulley
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In fairness to Microsoft, one thing I’m seeing from study so far is that this is likely more a case of Vista features being used for a NYT prototype project… not an actual application per se, but more a joint demo/trial/test of the viewing functions Vista OS will eventually be able to offer.
I’d guess there were business contacts going back years, and NYT was one of the contacts when MS marketing was trying to line up Vista launch stories, “we provide the engineering to build a reader, waddya say?” But the timing fell off, and now there are needs for momentum stories on Vista, to keep positive stuff in the press, so it became an exec/PR priority.
Meanwhile the NYT content team sees it from their point of view… to them, they’re suddenly seeing demos from MS, so “ms is making an application” is the lede.
Each party in the creation and telling of this story had different motivations, and these seem to have changed over time, which is why there may be a bit of confusion right now.
jd/adobe