The Price of a Sticker

What is the value of a sticker? To many, not much I'm sure. When I caved in to academic pressures and bought my laptop last year, it came adorned with all manner of little logos and stickers to the point it looked like the NASCAR model. One in particular which irked me was a little logo you may have seen before, the rather ubiquitous Windows compatibility logo. It was for Vista rather than the pictured Windows 7 logo, but you get the idea.

To me, this seemed a waste. Sure, it probably only cost a penny or so, but it was frustrating to me to have to take it off and added no value. I mean, it's not as if HP shipped alternative operating systems on the model, and stickers like this are about as meaningful as the red-and-white starbursts that proclaim 'new and improved' on the same laundry soap you've been buying for twenty years. Talk is cheap, and since the advent of affordable printing processes, print is even cheaper. So, what good is it?

Lately, I've started following a blog I ran across (It's dangerous to call it 'stumbling' these days. Will we have any verbs left unclaimed by the end of Web 2.0? But that's another rant topic for another day.) called Engineering Windows 7. It's not exactly a secret that I became something of a begrudging fan of Microsoft a few years ago, but I too had considered this to be mostly so much fluff. Then, I read this post from the EW7 blog. I knew that they had been putting some serious effort into testing Windows 7 and making real performance improvements, but I'd never realized how much they were doing to test the integrated system including hardware configurations. This probably marks the first time that I actually start to feel that we'll get every penny's worth out of the price of Windows. The sticker I scorned before actually means something this time around. And that's a change I welcome.