I read hundreds of pages on my computer every day. The other day, I came across one of the best enhancements to user experience I’ve seen in a very long time, Microsoft’s Cleartype. If you run Windows XP on an LCD, this freebee is a “must have.” The difference is incredible.
I know it’s been out for more than a year already, but I hadn’t heard of it before. It never made front page of Slashdot or Digg. On delicious, cleartype is barely making a dent considering how good the product is and the size of the company releasing it.
In more than a year, technorati has 3,902 posts that contain the word “cleartype”. Compare that to “google spreadsheet” - 1,415 posts in 4 days, 10,724 posts with “An Inconvenient Truth”, 17,322 for “writely”, or 169,645 for “web 2.0″.
If Apple, Firefox or Google released this product, I’m certain that you would have seen it everywhere. In fact, Google wouldn’t have even had to have released it: If some 3rd rate blogger started a rumor about google thinking of maybe developing something kinda-sorta like it, it would have gotten more coverage.
It’s clear. Microsoft needs to get better at Astroturfing. Astroturfing is when you fake, push or help mold a “grass roots” movement. Right now, they have all the hate associated with being a winner without the fanfare that could have accompanied their success.
It shouldn’t be that difficult to do considering their resourses, their products, their lenient stance on piracy, and that their founder has given more money to charity than anyone in the history of mankind.
They need more Microsoft fanboy sites that appear unrelated to the Microsoft Corporation. They also need some good SEO and Marketing execution to help get their message across to the public. Imagine how relatively inexpensive it would be to create a separate corporation to buy up web properties and blog networks to reinvent their image.
With the right resources, I bet I could do it.
8 Responses to “Cleartype on A Clearly Biased Web”
Thanks for the link. It really makes a difference, but now, with cleartype turned on it looks different. Maybe I have to get used to the new appeareance, but I have the feeling that I can read the text better without Cleartype.
Microsoft has forgotten to develop their online performance. They have money and much unused potential, as you already have hinted.
wow
things look, diffrent and a bitnicer but now even ugly fonts look good and i want to put them up on my site, lol ..and thats why i gota disable it 
nice tip
astroturfing … sweet …
Cleartype, by the way, is just sub-pixel anti-aliasing. Anti-aliasing is a technique that’s been around for a long time, and OS X has been doing this for quite some time as well. So, in effect, Apple and Microsoft are using the tech, but still it’s not something that everybody is blabbing about. Microsoft’s implementation is far from perfect, and Apple has their share of problems, too. But personally, I can’t stand to look at a display without it turned on.
[…] Über SEO Black Hat bin ich auf eine Sache gestoßen, die mir sehr zusagt. […]
The first day I used it, my eyes were completely bloodshot. It just took some getting used to. But now, I don’t know how I worked without it.
[…] Here’s the oddity - I only came across it because I was randomly surfing through bookmarks, and happened to visit SEO Black Hat. We don’t use any Black Hat methods in our optimization strategies, but we do keep up on what’s going on. Ignorance is not bliss. I flipped through the last couple of weeks worth of postings, and there it was. […]
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.
Before I started reading about he arcane art of SEO I probably spent most of my time on Windows related websites. There sure seemed to be plenty of them.
Cleartype is one of the first things I enable after turning off all the fancy effects.
Now that you bring this up I guess I’ll have to look around and see if the useful sites for Windows users are still about and just buried in Google.