Imagine a company which produces sound cards. Their sound cards do not work properly under Windows Vista. At least not as good as they were working for Windows XP. So, there comes a young programmer and develops new drivers that actually work.

You would guess that the company offers this guy a job, right? Not so Creative. They blame the young Brazilian to “steel their goods”. Oh man, no wonder those guys make losses. If they themselves would make their products work, this young programmer could do something more “creative” in his spare time, than fixing drivers of sound cards (that should actually work out of the box).

To me it seems like Creative designed those Vista drivers with certain flaws as a business strategy, so they can sell more “premium products”, which are probably the same, just with a driver that actually works. From a legal point of view, it might be their right to “castrate” their sound cards (I am not a lawyer).

But from a business point of view I wouldn’t call it clever.

The actions of their vice president of corporate communications, Phil O’Shaughnessy, might do more harm to the company than they might help. I am not sure if all those PR guys are already prepared for a world WITH internet. Things that might have worked for the last 20 years of PR might not working so well any more. Things have changed and PR guys should learn that, I guess.

Wake up! Welcome to the 21st century!

Customers communicate worldwide. We ALL have to live with globalization. I just hope for the guys at Creative that their shortsightedness might not have a too negative impact on their business.

I am not too sure if those things are really well thought by the companies. For my part I won’t buy a sound card of this company. I don’t like how they treat people that help others to make stuff work. I am not sure how long customers will cope with practices like this.

I saw the Asus Eee PC at the local Saturn store. It is tiny!

The small size has of course its positive and negative aspects: You could really take it everywhere. It is lightweight and fits into almost any bag or back bag. The keyboard is too small for proper 10 finger typing and the screen is too small for proper working, even for my taste.

But I that is not what the Eee PC is targeted for. While on a trip, for staying in contact with family and friends, doing some minor things in Open Office, checking and writing some emails, etc. this little helper would be perfect.

I didn’t have the chance for a proper test, but I could type some text and got an impression of the interface. Too windowsy for my taste. I first thought they had Windows XP installed. The built quality looked pretty good, for such an inexpensive tool.

The alternative from Elitegroup doesn’t look too bad either: ECS G10IL.

Well, yesterday someone had hacked my blog. I was a little bit behind with updating, but I thought I’d wait for the new version, Wordpress 2.5.

Anyway, as my blog wasn’t working any more after this attack, I had to reinstall everything, uploaded my back-ups, etc. And today the guys at Wordpress.org release the new version. Basically 2 days too late!

I guess I will wait a few days to install Wordpress 2.5. I can’t be bothered to do the same stuff again tonight.

First I will install all the important plug-ins. I give them a few weeks to fix the little problems that might appear in the next few days.