I’ve spent years trying to get coding students to avoid this fatal mistake , but maybe you'll listen to Elon.

Humility is a lovely thing. Thanks for your candor.

Lol if you were pointing out that I basically called myself a brilliant programmer, it was an accident I swear!

You're pulling our leg, right?

Whatever the numbers say, it is hardly the case that anybody has underreacted. Everywhere, we've always been at least three weeks behind the curve, which is an eternity when dealing with this virus.

Do you mean overreacted where you have written underreacted?

I’m no fan of the overlords, but this is clickbait. It isn’t eating lunch that’s extravagant but buying lunch. Brown-bagging is a time-tested way to cut expenses and a non-cruel suggestion.

I spend more time reading new submissions than front-page submissions. There are far more new submissions, and I usually have the time to go through at least four or five pages of them, so the pool is larger. What's more, cumulative advantage boosts good submissions that, for whatever reason, enjoy a strong start and penalizes good submissions that don't get out of the starting blocks as fast.

The question is humorously anthropocentric. Purpose is meaningful only to humans. Life occurs independently of human notions.

Mensa members are a small subpopulation of Americans with high IQ, so it's a stretch to conclude that high IQ is the problem. To me it's more plausible that someone seeking to boost self-esteem and social status by joining a weird organization tends to be a more troubled person than intelligent people in general.

Good point.

Waiting for the follow up study that a low IQ and medium-IQ are also correlated with having problems.

It may only be a coincidence, but I do have high IQ and exactly the kinds of problems they mention in the article. I'm not American or a member of Mensa. I have Hashimoto's thyroiditis, and inflamatory reactions to certain foods. I also have high anxiety. Strong emotions or stress can be overwhelming enough to give me gastritis or even ulcers sometimes.

Welcome to the human race. We all feel that way at times I would tend to believe.

I’ll second this. I have the same as you - autoimmune issues that cause hypothyroidism. Stress and anxiety that debilitates me at times. Not American, not Mensa too.

Just anecdotal but at least there’s two of us :)

As a former advertising executive, I can tell you what the problem is here. The writer and his boss who approved the copy aren't addressing the customer, they're addressing the boss's boss. In a dysfunctional organization like Microsoft, communicating up rather than out is how you get promoted. It's a rare Microsoft employee who moves up the ladder by thinking about the customer.

Well in fairness, the link points to the Windows blog. The actual marketing page should probably be the link: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/surface/devices/surface-book...

This should be the linked page. A lot more of information than the blog post.

Perhaps if we summon dang it will be changed?

Thanks for paying attention and pointing this out, a blog post is not a product catalogue!

Well that ad's great. It has a footnote giving caveats to the very first sentence!

This might be one of the best explanations I have seen for MS ad copy and marketing in general. Thanks for the insight.

I never actually considered it from an "internal customer" (i.e. the boss) perspective. I just always saw them as painfully out of touch, but it isn't an "out of touch" issue; it is a focus issue.

"they're addressing the boss's boss"

I wonder about that with truck commercials.

I feel like every truck commercial is a sort of "See this is how we want our customers to act!"

The difference is they are demonstrating fantasies or idealizations that much of their customer base have or aspire to themselves. Truck commercials are made that way with a large part of their customer base keenly in mind.

Describing communication in terms of flow and direction is intriguing; it does sound like you have the experience to know what the problem is.

I really appreciated this analysis, thank you.

I just clicked the blgopost and was surprised by its quality even after having read these comments. I expect large companies to display good grammar.

Relatedly, it seems like Microsoft has a million blogs on different domains, it's hard to keep track of what's what.

I don't think that's what is going on here. The guy who wrote this (Panos Panay) is the VP in charge of the entire Surface brand. He is the boss.

It's my understanding that Panos Panay reports to Brad Smith, who reports to Satya Nadella. He is a boss, not the boss.

Also, he's a VP, so he will probably not have written it himself.

Incredibly accurate.

I've suspected this is the case at a LOT of companies. So many marketing and advertising decisions are made this way. As long as they sell enough units it looks like a success, no matter how much potential was thrown away.

This is what made Jobs so great. Most of the criticisms about him are surely correct, but he was a boss who tried to understand the customer, and succeeded at it frequently.

[gone]

“addressing the boss's boss” isn’t referring to writing for high-level decision makers at other organizations, it means writing for people within Microsoft.

The curve for divorce takes the same U shape, though it's steeper. It peaks around 60. This might suggest that unhappiness in marriage plays a role in overall unhappiness. In their early 20s most people aren't yet married to wrong partners. By their 60s most people who ever married have either divorced wrong partners or are living in bearable marriages.