My favourite Bill Gates story

It's Bill Gates last day at Microsoft. Luckily we now have Eric Schmidt at Google to blame stuff on. He is the new Bill making the real Bill seem much less evil. I have heard lots of Bill stories over the years, but one of my favourite Bill stories is not even true.

Well it wouldn't be as it comes from one of my Favourite Douglas Coupland novels 'Microserfs', which is about some geeks who work at Microsoft. He followed it up a couple of years ago (not quite as successfully) with jPod.

Anyway, if you have not read it, do so, you might like it: Here's the Bill extract (I'm still dealing with the fact that we lived to see Bill depart) and even though its not true I'm sure that at one time or another Bill flamed someone.

          Microserfs, Friday

 

This morning, just after 11:00, Michael locked himself in his office and he won't come out.

 

Bill (Bill!) sent Michael this totally wicked flame-mail from hell on the e-mail system - and he just wailed on a chunk of code Michael had written. Using the Bloom County-cartoons-taped-on-the-door index, Michael is certainly the most sensitive coder in Building Seven - not the type to take criticism easily. Exactly why Bill would choose Michael of all people to wail on is confusing. We figured it must have been a random quality check to keep the troops in line. Bill's so smart.

 

Bill is wise.

Bill is kind.

Bill is benevolent.

Bill, Be My Friend...Please!

 

 

Actually, nobody on our floor has ever been flamed by Bill personally. The episode was tinged with glamour and we were somewhat jealous. I tried to tell Michael this, but he was crushed.

 

Shortly before lunch he stood like a lump outside my office. His skin was pale like rising bread dough, and his Toppy's cut was dripping sweat, leaving little damp marks on the oyster-gray-with-plum highlights of the Microsoft carpeting. He handed me a printout of Bill's memo and then gallumphed into his office, where he's been burrowed ever since.

 

He won't answer his phone, respond to e-mail, or open his door. On his doorknob he placed a "Do Not Disturb" thingy stolen from the Boston Radisson during last year's Macworld Expo. Todd and I walked out onto the side lawn to try to peek in his window, but his Venetian blinds were closed and a gardener with a leaf blower chased us away with a spray of grass clippings.

 

They mow the lawn every ten minutes at Microsoft. It looks like green Lego pads.

 

 

Finally, at about 2:30 a.m., Todd and I got concerned about Michael's not eating, so we drove to the 24-hour Safeway in Bellevue. We went shopping for "flat" foods to slip underneath Michael's door.

 

The Safeway was completely empty save for us and a few other Microsoft people just like us - hair-trigger geeks in pursuit of just the right snack. Because of all the rich nerds living around here, Redmond and Bellevue are very "on-demand" neighborhoods. Nerds get what they want when they want it, and they go psycho if it's not immediately available. Nerds over-focus. I guess that's the problem. But it's precisely this ability to narrow-focus that makes them so good at code writing: one line at a time, one line in a strand of millions.

 

 

When we returned to Building Seven at 3:00 a.m., there were still a few people grinding away. Our group is scheduled to ship product in just eleven days (Top Secret: We'll never make it).

 

Michael's office lights were on, but once again, when we knocked, he wouldn't answer his door. We heard his keyboard chatter, so we figured he was still alive. The situation really begged a discussion of Turing logic - could we have discerned that the entity behind the door was indeed even human? We slid Kraft singles, Premium Plus crackers, Pop-Tarts, grape leather, and Freezie-Pops in to him.

 

Todd asked me, "Do you think any of this violates geek dietary laws?"

 

Just then, Karla in the office across the hall screamed and then glared out at us from her doorway. Her eyes were all red and sore behind her round glasses. She said, "You guys are only encouraging him," like we were feeding a raccoon or something. I don't think Karla ever sleeps.

 

She harrumphed and slammed her door closed. Doors sure are important to nerds.

 

Anyway, by this point Todd and I were both really tired. We drove back to the house to crash, each in our separate cars, through the Campus grounds - 22 buildings worth of nerd-cosseting fun - cloistered by 100-foot-tall second growth timber, its streets quiet as the womb: the foundry of our culture's deepest dreams.

 

There was mist floating on the ground above the soccer fields outside the central buildings. I thought about the e-mail and Bill and all of that, and I had this weird feeling - of how the presence of Bill floats about the Campus, semi-visible, at all times, kind of like the dead grandfather in the Family Circus cartoons. Bill is a moral force, a spectral force, a force that shapes, a force that molds. A force with thick, thick glasses.

 

 

I am daniel.u@microsoft.com. If my life was a game of Jeopardy! my seven dream categories would be:

 

    * Tandy products

    * Trash TV of the late '70s and early '80s The history of Apple

    * Career anxieties

    * Tabloids

    * Plant life of the Pacific Northwest

    * Jell-O 1-2-3

 

Budweiser just doesn't travel all that well

Nothing much good ever came out of Belgium apart from beer, getting invaded and...oh some other stuff. The beer has turned InBev into a global drinks firm and it is now planning a hostile bid for Anheuser-Busch. It wants to turn Budweiser into a global brand, but I know I am not the only one thinking that the King of American Beers does not travel.

Do you ever drink Budweiser? I do really occasionally. When it is free and cold. There is no other reason to drink it. It has quite a clean neutral taste, which some might call watery, which I think might account for the fact it tastes of very little.

It's like Stella in that sense. I'm glad our affair with Stella is over. It doesn't taste that nice either.

InBev, which is already the world's largest brewer, said last night that it would launch a hostile bid for Anheuser-Busch after its $46bn bid was rejected as "financially inadequate".

I can't help thinking that this bid (and definitely this hostile bid) is not a smart move and will lead to some serious damage being done to InBev.

If it wins it says it will put Budweiser into new markets. "There is a big international opportunity for the Bud flagship brand. We have operations in 30 countries around the world, and that would be a great platform to develop that brand," Carlos Brito, InBev's chief executive has said.

Personally, I don't think that a lot of markets are going to accept it. When it comes to beer it often doesn't travel that well, which means that Inbev will spend tens of millions trying to achieve this "international opportunity" for the Bud brand without much success.

And it has form in this area having previously tried and failed to do it with other brands.

There is a piece in the New York Times today about how InBev tried a similar trick with Brazilian beer Brahma. Never heard of it so maybe they did not try here all that hard, but it tried to push this beer that apparently "evokes the beautiful bodies for which the country is famous" globally in 2005.

It didn't work, which is why most of us don't drink it and the brand has not really made it in many markets outside of Brazil in the way say that Mexican beer brand Corona has. Corona is owned by Grupo Modelo, which is 50% owned by Anheuser-Busch.

This could all be a moot point as the Americans don't want Budweiser to be owned by the Belgians. You can see their point. Little Belgium has problems even forming a government with the company split down the middle between the French speakers and the Dutch-speaking Flemish.

The Americans have a plan and it involves cost cutting, as all plans do, which could see marketing being hit as well as its Busch Gardens theme park business being sold. What a beer company was doing with a theme park is anyone's guess. I'm betting that won't travel either.

Bold moves by Nokia could finally challenge Google

Huge moves this week in the world of mobile as Nokia bought the half of Symbian it didn't already own, and announced plans to make its software free of charge. That's millions in revenue it is giving up. Very Scandinavian.

Symbian was created by Psion with Nokai, which once led the charge with a British PDA that was ahead of the curve. The Psion Organisers are long gone (the last was created more than ten years ago), but Symbian is now in more than 200m mobile phones.

Mobile is the next great tech battlefield after the desktop and the competition is fierce. With Apple vying with the overrated/overpriced iPhone, Research In Motion with BlackBerry, Google now in the market with its gPhone and Android operating system, Microsoft and Symbian.

Nokia needed to do something bold to take on the threat posed by Google and Apple and it has. It is buying stakes from share holders Ericsson, Sony Ericsson, Panasonic, and Siemens. Samsung is also expected to sell. It will then take its own smartphone operating system and merge it with that of rivals to create one free-of-charge open source software product.

The product will be controlled by non-profit organisation, the Symbian Foundation. Members of the foundation, and there are already 20, will all be able to use the new operating system, install it for free and develop their own applications.

Symbian's chief executive, Nigel Clifford, has called the creation of the Symbian Foundation as "epoch-making". That sounds about right, it could be.

It creates a powerful incentive for mobile firms like Vodafone, AT&T, Orange, Nokia, Samsung and LG who are already signed up to use the system and rival Google.

Beating Google is essential and this takes the fight to them before it has even got its act fully together. We've already seen how it acts in the online world with its strangle hold over search and the search marketing.

Thelondonpaper rumour mill

Take a day off and you miss it. Thelondonpaper to close? It seems unlikely that the Murdochs would abandon the battle and close thelondonpaper, which like its rival London Lite is haemorrhaging piles of cash daily, but would they go for a merger?

Peter Preston in the Observer raised the idea of a merger harking back to when the Evening News and the Evening Standard merged decades earlier.

But while such a decision would make financial sense (thelondonpaper lost £16.5m in the first year of its operation) it would represent a huge loss of faith and essentially hand victory to Associated Newspapers and take the pressure off of the Evening Standard.

Thelondonpaper currently out distributes London Lite by almost 100,000 copies with its circulation of 500,000 and it really seems to show.

Some days I rarely see London Lite. It is not distributed outside my Tube station home (Baron's Court - just down the road from Associated HQ) and on the Tube itself it often looks like a sea of thelondonpaper. Although I am not sure why that is the case as there are usually two of each standing outside the bigger Hammersmith station.

It would be a shame if it did close or merge. Not only does it look better and fresher, but it would obviously lead to journalistic job losses.

That process has already started in a small way over at Associated as Press Gazette reported last week that the London Evening Standard and London Lite have merged their newsdesk operations, leading to the departure of London Lite news editor Michael Leese.

The changes mean Standard news editor Hugh Dougherty will now oversee the news editing of the Evening Standard and London Lite alongside his deputy Steve Vaughan.

It also means that London Lite is even more a shadow of the Evening Standard. You might ask if that really matters when it comes to a freebie evening read? I think it does.

A News International's response to the speculation of closure was to deny it outright and, in doing so, did point to its new shiny Hertfordshire printing plant that represents a £650m investment.

"We intend to build on the success of our market leading national titles and that of thelondonpaper in the years ahead."

Well it would say that, wouldn't it? But when you are making denials no one ever quite believes you, particularly if you have just closed your loss-making magazine division as James Murdoch did.

Many observers read that as a cue that he was willing to take tough decisions and that next on his list was to close the even bigger loss maker that is thelondonpaper.

But look at it another way, maybe he was making a tough call on what was not a core part of News International's business in News Magazines and sell women's weekly title Love it!, as the publisher prepares to dig in for the long-haul battle in the London freesheet market. Newspapers are after all its business.

The return of Garry Lace - it's a coup

You can't keep a good adman down. Garry Lace, whose highflying career took not one but two unfortunate turns, has a new job -- running a company that offers ad space in toilets. Is it me or do these headlines write themselves.

Lace, who left Lowe in 2006 after an investigation and was forced to leave Grey before that, is to be managing director of Admedia, an out-of-home and experiential media owner.

Admedia are describing hiring Lace as "a coup". Well, as Lace is taking an equity stake in the business no one is going to be kicking him out anytime soon. It's more of a publicity coup than anything else, as people will certainly be talking.

It has to be a conversation starter: Garry Lace has just invested in our company. Is he scoping out a rival? Just kidding.

Lace was one of the brightest stars of his generation, becoming joint managing director alongside Johnny Hornby at TBWA\ at 32 and it looked like he would have a brilliant career until it all went very pair shaped when he took the top job at Grey.

At Grey he quit after a hoax email claimed Lace was set to quit the agency to set up an Air Miles-type loyalty scheme. He denied the plan but left Grey a month later.

He was hired in 2005 by Lowe London as chief executive, it seemed a perfect comeback, but it lasted little more than a year before he was suspended indefinitely and then quit after an investigation into his conduct and reported links with former agency chief and now rival Sir Frank Lowe.

He takes up his new brief on July 1, having most recently been at direct and digital agency Intelligent Marketing. Washroom might not be the most glamorous or interesting part of the business, but it is probably a sound bet as drunk people will always need something to read while leaning into the urinal.

That might be unfair, but the only time I ever notice washroom advertising is when I am in the kind of place where really its not such a great idea to be. I'm not just talking about South London.

But to be fair Admedia, which was founded by current joint CEOs Philip Vecht and Jonathan Naggar, also has space in 200 shopping centres and all 131 motorway services.

Energizer Grand Prix ad is a cringeworthy winner

It isn't just me. I've polled the office and the general opinion of the Energizer ad from DDB South Africa, which won the Press Grand Prix at Cannes, is cringeworthy beyond belief and leaves you wondering who would create something like that?

I can see what they were trying to achieve, but somehow the provocative mix of the children with one gaping down the other's trousers coupled with the line "The world's longest lasting battery" jettisons taste out of the window.

But that's only my opinion, the judges said it "spoke to a universal truth and could have come from anywhere in the world" and it apparently won with a comfortable majority. Really? I don't see that ad getting made here or in the US. Maybe life is different back home in Johannesburg

The Energizer work was supposed to detail the kind of mischief children can get up to when the batteries on their toys run out such as "showing each other their privates".

Jury president Craig Davis, the worldwide chief creative officer at JWT, described it as "extremely powerful and resonant, a great piece of work for a proper, grown-up brand. It also has its fair share of charm and is a catalyst for conversations".

Well what do you think?

'Battlestar Galactica' mid-season finale brilliance

Please I want more and I can't wait until next year. It has already won raves review, but I have only just got around to watching the mid-season finale of 'Battlestar Galactica' and I am going to have to watch it again. It was better than 'Lost', which is still scoring for me, and still sitting there on Sky+ ready to be watched again. I've said it before, but it's the best TV around.

Rarely does an hour of television rise off of the screen and manage to pack so much in not least its bleak final homage to Charlton Heston and 'Planet of the Apes'.

If you haven't already seen this show go out and buy the DVDs, but suffice to say Tuesday's episode 'Revelations', the last until the final batch of episodes appear next year, delivered exactly what it promised: our rag tag shot to bits fleet finally made it to Earth and what did they find?

That's right a dark and grim nuclear wasteland, a world washed away and apparently leaving the characters nowhere to turn.

It was such as brave move to make with as many as 10 episodes left to run. The whole show that is so much about focused on gods/god, religious mythology and faith was about finding earth.

That was going to be their salvation, but it looks like they won't be partying down on a nuked out earth. Not that the show, which began with a nuclear apocalypse, has included suicide bombers and people shoved out of airlocks along the way, has ever been much of a party.

Lots of speculation about where they landed with reference to the show's much-talked-of opera house, which links several of the Cylon and human characters. Did they make it to Australia? Or New York?

Who knows, but now there is a long wait for the final episodes of the show, which has seen something of a resurgence since its fourth series began, after the Sci-Fi channel produced a movie that aired on Sky One here and went straight to DVD. They are now talking of three more possible spin off DVD movies.

This is on top of the Sci-Fi Channel's 'Battlestar' spin-off project 'Caprica', set before 'Battlestar'.

There are also to be another set of webisodes that will link the first 10 episodes of Season 4 and the second half of the fourth and final season.

It is a show that so deserved a bigger audience. Still, now just a long wait and lots of time for geeky speculation filling up the web.

I like this one best. There were no humans, and that everyone has been a Cylon or a human-Cylon hybrid all along.

Even John McCain has been outted as a Cylon. No surprise really, just look at his similarity to BSG's Colonel Sol Tigh. Amusingly spooky and another reason to vote for Obama.

Anyways, visit the very good blog Galactica Sitrep for more.

Are you LinkedIn?

The New York Times calls it boring by design. It isn't far wrong, but today LinkedIn, the social networking site for professionals, seems to have come of age after being valued at $1bn.

It has never had the attention of Facebook, MySpace or even Bebo (which was sold for $850m to AOL, less than LinkedIn is now valued at).

I signed up for LinkedIn, as you do, but have never done a thing with it. Much less than I ever did with MySpace and nowhere near the time I wasted on Facebook (by wasted I mean invested, I mean that never-ending movie quiz is bound to come in handy).

The valuation has come after LinkedIn raised $53m in capital, primarily from Bain Capital Ventures, the Boston-based private equity firm.

It is valued at $1bn in the same way that Microsoft's stake in Facebook valued that social media behemoth at $15bn, but it is still quite a leap on its previous valuation of more than the $580m.

Is it really worth that? Well, it claims to have 23m members and to already be making a profit. Unlike its rivals, which are struggling to attract enough advertising, LinkedIn gets only around $25m of its $100m revenues from ads, the rest comes from premium subscription services and services to recruiters. That's right, it makes you pay to contact other users on the site, which is probably another reason why I never went very far down the LinkedIn road. In that way, its revenue model has almost more in common with a dating site.

The $1bn figure is also far outstrips rival Plaxo, which was sold to cable and broadband company Comcast for between $145m and $175m last month.

Many of the people I know who use it also use Facebook, but seem to spend more time on there than on LinkedIn, which is much more focused and targeted, and guarantees you will never get any vampire or Texas Hold'em invites.

Almost underlining its status as a business network was the story last week that a court ordered a former recruitment firm employee to hand over business contacts he made on LinkedIn as he was using his online network to approach clients. You couldn't imagine that happening with Facebook or maybe you could considering many of us Facebook at work.


LinkedIn should be the perfect social networking site for business and for this industry, but despite its valuation it seems to lack much buzz. Maybe that's the thing? It has been quietly getting on with itself, building its network of users globally and allowing them to make connections. I mean, it is after all a business tool that has been built to allow business-to-business networking and the average age of the people on LinkedIn is 41.

Apparently by this age the need for photos of drunken antics on your profile and organising chaotic parties are over.

So ask yourself this question: are you still filling your Facebook profile with pictures of the entertaining exploits of you and your friends? If the answer is yes you are probably in the right place. If it is no then it is probably time to move on.

If you are still in two minds listen to Reid Hoffman, LinkedIn's founder and chairman was an early investor in Facebook.

While he doesn't want to put the boot into the opposition he likes to point out that most members of Facebook who are older than 30 use it for entertainment, like playing Scrabulous.

"Scrabulous is not work, and it does not enable you to be an effective professional," he said.

Clearly he has (not) been to our office.

Three Lions - well two fairly skins chaps and their mate

You're either watching the festival of football with real interest or you are like me watching little bits with a slight air of gloominess. There is a third option you could be making amusing virals like this one.

Its from Savanna Cider. No I have never heard of the brand either, but cider is going to be hot again this summer and as football is staying home fans have got to do something.

The lyrics in the viral play nicely on the classic Lightning Seeds/David Baddiel and Frank Skinner 'Three Lions' song, which is definitely one of the better England related songs ever produced (sorry but I am holding out for New Order and World in Motion as my number footie song). Football rather than coming home is "staying home".

The viral supports the brand's 'Support a Life Less Sweet' campaign launched on a day when England went out to Croatia so the viral is only fitting - created by Draftfcb. 

Vote, vote vote for Kelvin MacKenzie

Former Sun editor Kelvin MacKenzie is "90 per cent certain" to put his name forward" and run against Conservative MP and egomaniac David Davis. I really hope he does.

MacKenzie said yesterday that: "I have been associated with The Sun for 30 years. The Sun is very, very hostile to David Davis because of his 28-day stance and The Sun has always been very up for 42 days and perhaps even 420 days."

Davis says it is all about civil liberties and opposing the government's plan to hold terrorist suspects for 42-day, but clearly it is not about that. Having bludgeoned his own party into opposing a police supported Gordon Brown plan to fight terror it is clear that this by-election move is about his personal political celebrity so overshadowed by David Cameron who beat him in the battle for the Tory Party leadership.

While there is often much to dislike about MacKenzie he has been a force to be reckoned with in the British media for more than 20 years. From the Sun to TalkSport and back again. It seems whatever it is he does he always keeps it interesting and despite myself, and as a Labour Party member, I have enjoyed some of his popularist stunts and front pages from his 'Stick it up your Junta' to 'Up Yours Delores'. Yes, I know it's wrong, but I can't help myself. He is no Nigel Barton, but he says exactly what is on his mind. Davis wants us to think the same of him, but it is simply not true.

As the ever spineless Liberal Democrats led by sex god Nick Clegg have decline to field a candidate. I am hoping that Labour do the same. They should not listen to some in the party who want to fight. It will only indulge the vain Davis by fielding a candidate and the battle should not be dignified with a Labour candidate and should instead be left to descend into the media farce that it will become.

With the debate about 42-days detention supported by the Sun and the police I hope Rupert Murdoch backs his man and they run a campaign and to stand. Davis has a majority of a more than 5,000 in the East Yorkshire constituency of Haltemprice and Howden. It is not an insurmountable figure. Davis can and should be beaten so as not to reward him with any kind of victory for wasting time and money with this fight.

That said I am enjoying the discomfort it is causing to Cameron who has only risen as Gordon Brown's seesaw has fallen. 

Davis is coming under pressure form Tory Grandees including Lord Heseltine who has described Davis's decision move as "incomprehensible". It is just that. Lord Tebbit is equally dumbstruck.

"I find it difficult to understand the logic of it. He won the argument in the Shadow Cabinet and he won the argument in the debate in the Commons and then he calls a by-election. It seems to me over the top. It's beyond my comprehension," Tebbit said.

There is something to thank Davis for. He has saved us somewhat from Big Brother. Maybe he should go into the house and canvas for votes. It is it seems the house that he is best suited to rather than any in Westminster where there is real work to be done.

Jerry Yang smart dumb

I'm sure that Yahoo! chief executive Jerry Yang is a very smart man, but it seems that, like a lot of men, he is of the smart-dumb variety. That's the only way to explain why he would want to sign a deal with his biggest competitor Google, which has in a short few years crushed Yahoo!'s own search business.

Yang, like a bride on the run, white dress trailing in the dust, has escaped the altar a second time, leaving Microsoft wondering what is with this guy? Good question.

Yang is being pursued by the equivalent of shotgun-toting angry fathers in the form of investors such as Carl Icahn. Yang's luck can't possibly last  -- the deal he is trying to marry in haste with Google is bound to raise anti-trust issues.

I mean come on, Google already is the all powerful search monster (a great one at that) so how can it not? Yang must really hate Microsoft. It might only be a North American deal, but worth noting that in the UK alone Google accounts for 87.3% of searches alone. Yahoo! just 4%. 

Under the agreement that Yahoo! is signing, Google will supply some of the advertising on Yahoo!'s search engine and other properties.

It should give Yahoo! around $800m in revenues to bolster its dwindling business, but it appears an easy way out and not a brave leap into the future. Yang, it seems, needs to go as he would rather take the company down with him than do a deal with Microsoft or anyone else.

Granted it is a bit desperate when your only options are the devil or the moderately deep blue sea.

Yang, of course, says the deal is great for Yahoo! and in the short term it is fine, but to say it "strengthening our competitiveness" is probably overselling it.

The only real winner here is Google. It has found a very nice way to make money out of one of its rivals. Whoever gets that chance? This deal makes Google stronger than ever, it spreads its influence further and that (as much as I use Google Search/News/Mail) can not be good for the web overall and weakens Microsoft.

The funniest thing I have read about this story is a quote from Google chief executive Eric Schmidt;

"This deal in many ways reflects an emerging and new structure for the industry. Certainly we'd like to do more business with Yahoo over time."

He sounds like a man rubbing his hands together and sizing up what looks like a very tasty meal Unsurprisingly Schmidt wants to expand the deal outside of the US and Canada as he thinks it is going to be "very successful".
 

Channel 4 must act and remove bully

With almost 400 complaints about bullying housemate Alexandra, Channel 4 is showing itself full of weakness and indecision by its failure to remove her from the house. We know why it is dithering. Last night's show pulled in a combined 3m-plus viewers, but by leaving her in it condones her actions and sets an unpleasant example.

I have only seen clips of this year's show so far, but you do not have had to have seen very much of Alexandra to know that her swearing and shouting at fellow contestants is deeply unpleasant.

As Jim Shelley pointed out in the Daily Mirror today, she makes previous bullies like Jade and Charley look like choir girls... well not as I remember them.

"What's dangerous about people like her is not the aggression -- just plain unpleasant -- but that she's so deluded. Her rants are invariably capped off by the warning 'remember I told you'. She will dismiss any disagreement with the words 'moving swiftly on' as if she were Trisha holding court.

"This is a woman whose mindset is based on conflict, anger and being right. Previous BB hate figures like Nasty Nick or Charley Uchea have had another layer and been entertaining. But I just don't want someone like Alexandra in my living room. For the sake of the show and her own safety, BB take her out now."

 

Channel 4 is chasing ratings by leaving her in and it is working because the numbers for the series are climbing, with 3m tuning into watch the show last night (including Channel 4+1) giving it a 15.6% share, which is great for the broadcaster, but it needs to show some leadership and act swiftly before this turns into a TV car crash.

Government takes ridiculous line on product placement

Culture secretary Andy Burnham has spoken out strongly against product placement with some ridiculous line that it further risks harming trust in TV. Complete rubbish.I have no problem at all with product placement and for commercial broadcasters it can and should be a source of income, as long as it is done in the right way and setting.

Whether it is characters referring to their Apple Macs in dramas (but only if they are geeky and make lists about stuff) or as ITV's commercial director Rupert Howell said recent if a character in the popular farming programme 'Emmerdale' talks about their Barbour as these people in the country do.

"But I live in the countryside where, if it's pouring with rain, people say, 'Put on your Barbour' - they don't say, 'Put on your waxed raincoat'. In Emmerdale at the moment they have to say, 'Put on your waxed raincoat' - how ridiculous is that? If Barbour then have to give a little bit of money towards the production of Emmerdale I can't see anything wrong with that, particularly as in the credits you'd be saying, 'Barbour is a contributor towards this programme," Howell told the Independent recently.

It would bring much needed income in particularly as traditional broadcast spots face the challenges of ad skipping. It makes perfect sense and it has worked very well in the US without, as Burnham said, damaging trust in TV.

Ford had a long tie-up with '24', jack Bauer driving around as he did in his rather nice Ford Expedition SUV. He didn't spend his whole time saying "I'll catch the bad guys in my Ford Expedition, it is the natural choice for all would be special agents".

I have no idea why Burnham and the government have decided to oppose Europe on this (can't they find something decent to challenge Europe on like scarping MEPs?). Its opposition only harms companies like ITV and does no good.

Already today ITV's share price has fallen 3%. Burnham said he saw product placement as contaminating programming. This is a very stupid thing to say does he only watch BBC Four? Or, like Gordon Brown, not watch TV.

"I can see the arguments and the benefits of product placement, and understand why people feel it is an inevitability given the pressures they are under. But I can also see the costs. There is a risk that product placement exacerbates this decline in trust [in television] and contaminates our programmes.

"There is a risk that at the very moment when television needs to do all it can to show its bona fides that we elide the distinction between programmes and adverts. As a viewer I don't want to feel the script has been written by the commercial marketing director," he said.

He is confusing it seems two issues in linking the premium rate call scandals with scripted programming (soaps, comedies and drama), which as far as I know have never been in question.

No writers are going to let marketing directors near the creative product and they shouldn't have to, because products can be slipped in naturally in the way that you or I might say "I'll have a coke, a Stella and a Pimms please".

To even suggest that a marketing director will take his pen to a script is stupid.

It is being reported that the government will have to introduce legislation or pass a new order under the European Communities Act outlawing product placement after the EU directive comes into place.

So what will Howell do now? He and ITV have been lobbying the Department of Culture, Media & Sport to modify regulations in line with the European Union's Broadcast Directive, which takes a positive view of product placement as they should it makes sense and will not offend the vast majority of viewers. Commercial TV has to pay for itself somehow, Burnham does realise that right?

Apple iPhone ad where they actually mention price

I'm still not worked up about the Apple iPhone if they are giving it away on some tarrifs after Steve Jobs had his epiphany and it finally sunk home that even if you are Apple you can not overcharge people for your overrated products all of the time. Genius.

You know that price is a big deal this time around as Apple actually mentions the fact in this ad that the new phone is half the price of the last one. Apple might as well come out and say it: "We over charged you last time, that's why we have cut our prices in half".

Anyway, tempted or not take a look at this 'Ocean's 11'-leaning spot, which is distinctly underwhelming and o I am still not interested, I am sticking with what I've got (Blackberry), but thanks for asking.

Scrap the news bring on the advertising

If things were not already bad enough in the US newspaper business Tribune, which owns the Los Angeles Times, wants to slash 500 pages of news each week from the newspapers and up the advertising editorial ratio. Thanks, now you mention it I will take some news with my advertising.

There have already been hundreds of job cuts and Tribune boss, property billionaire Sam Zell, has announced more.

It's the same old same old, but oh wait it's much worse. It seems the only way to save the patient already ravaged by terrible diseases such as Craigslist (wouldn't want to catch that one) is to lop off a limb. Of course, that will work.

The 500 pages of news each week will be cut from a dozen papers that also include The Chicago Tribune, The Baltimore Sun, The Orlando Sentinel and The Hartford Courant. The aim is to hit a 50-50 editorial advertising split. This does not include classified advertising and special ad sections. At The Los Angeles Times alone it will see news cut by 82 pages a week with smaller reductions at other papers, which will save cash and see more newsroom jobs go.

It will apparently deliver - according to the New York Times, which has suffered its own cuts - a "thinner, flashier, more local newspaper, with a smaller newsroom staff". It is yet another approach to a problem of shrinking newspaper circulations. It sounds like a desperate one though.

It is one of those issues where it is impossible to find any middle ground. Editors will be up in arms, but will advertisers be happy with a weakened editorial product and damaged brand? And for that matter what about the readers? How will they take it?

Well apparently they will hardly notice claims Mike Simonton, senior director at Fitch Ratings in Chicago. He says most readers would hardly notice a modest decline in the volume of news, or if staff-written articles were replaced by those from wire services like The Associated Press or Reuters.

I'm sure there's a little truth to that, but a paper filled with material (quality though it might be) from the wires is not actually a newspaper (I can go to Google News and get that) and people will notice. In an industry facing a meltdown hard choices need to be made, it's just if you take it too far going back is hard.