Brant Walsh
4 HN recommenders · recommended in 19 months, 2011–2026
2:56 · 1.3M views · Feb 27, 2006
A 2006 parody made by a Microsoft team that shows how the company would redesign iPod packaging, with a box piled with feature claims, logos and clutter in contrast to Apple's clean design.
HN commenters bring it up whenever Microsoft product naming, branding or marketing is confusing, pointing to it as a long-running self-aware critique.
20 comments from Hacker News
Many tech products are still sold on feature lists. Few people care any more. This great (short and funny) internal video from Microsoft was supposed to be a wake up call, but nothing really changed: this video The fact that Apple doesn't really play that game seems to drive some people wild.
It's just a few lines of text complain about Windows, and some windows UI screenshots copied onto a max desktop. Not worth 2 minutes of video. The original "Microsoft iPod" video from 2006 is much better this video
This is supposedly an MS-produced parody of it's marketing efforts. It's very old now (I think it uses a 1st gen iPod?) but is still worth a laugh: this video Thankfully MS have learnt a lot of lessons since.
It's over 19 years old, but this video is a brutal but hilarious commentary on Microsoft's inherent dysfunction when it comes to product naming and packaging. Still on point decades later. this video
Actually I don't think most programmers are capable of designing something like spacex.com - every image on the site fits the minimalist theme (and there are hundreds). The photos are always dark in the appropriate areas so the text is readable, and they're dynamically cropped/resized with good positioning for all breakpoints. - the front page appears to be simple, but if you click through the site there are actually a ton of dynamic illustrations and charts like this: [LINK] The key thing is that the aesthetic is executed consistently and with restraint. This video is a bit old now but it's as true now as it's ever been: this video Minimalism is the most difficult aesthetic to pull off, because it's easy for the end result to look unfinished, cheap or lazy. I think the problem is not that coders can't be designers, but that coders generally don't really care about design, and I say that as a coder. If you gave the spacex project to the average coder, you'll probably end up with something like sap.com or fortinet.com Web design has converged a lot in the last 20 years because people don't want to learn a new UI for every website they visit. This makes good web design harder , because now if you want to create something memorable and distinctive, you'll need to do it in spite of the navigation and functional parts looking identical to every other site.