Best Buy: Dress all the sales reps up like Dumbledore!

My colleagues Mary Jo Foley and Adrian Kingsley-Hughes wrote today about the plans that Microsoft has in place to train retail sales staff at Best Buy how to position PCs with Windows 7 for prospective systems buyers against Apple’s Macintosh systems and of all things, Linux.

This sort of grassroots negative campaigning against the Mac and Linux is really not the way Microsoft should address buyers in the upcoming year and holiday season. Just like negative political campaign advertising and grassroots door to door stomping, it often leaves a bad taste in everyone’s mouth and comes off as completely without class. Worst case, it has even been known to even backfire as a campaign technique. From the perspective of effective sales and marketing tactics, at best I would classify this as bottom feeding.

Click to read the rest of this article at ZDNet Tech Broiler.

Victor von Frankenstein Never Had to Deal With RMAs

Several months ago I put up a blog post called “Extreme PCs and Homebrewing: Rest In Peace”, which needless to say attracted a great deal of responses on both side of the fence, those that agreed that due to the economy and the factors surrounding the business of homebrewing and component sales, system building is probably in its last days, and others who vehemently oppose the notion that the practice of home-brewing your own computer is going away.

Read the rest of this article at ZDNet Tech Broiler.

Apple: The Time for Legal Clones is Now

Over the years, I’ve been a stalwart advocate of cloning Macintosh PCs. This has made sense ever since Apple moved from the PowerPC to the x86 platform, where the genetic distinction between “Mac” and “PC” was reduced to the flip of a single electronic chromosome – the use of EFI versus the PC BIOS to boot the OS. Of course, switching to EFI was not going to stop the most dedicated hackers who wanted to run Mac OS X on their PCs. Since the very moment of moving the Mac platform to Intel chips, The “Hackintosh” community has been engaged in various underground activities to make the OS boot on standardized, off-the-shelf PCs.

Click to read the rest of this story at DATAMATION