More Nerd Humor

You will think I’m a nerd. (I am a nerd.) I think this is funny:

You see, this is funny for several reasons…

First off, anything to do with Back to the Future is great, especially when you have Doc Brown himself bumbling around the time machine. By the way, I love Bob’s “life preserver.”

Second, I love to see Microsoft poke fun of itself. They’ve had tons of brilliant ideas and a few stinkers as well. (Microsoft Bob, anyone? ¹) Any company that can laugh at itself and handle it this smooth deserves a lot of credit.

Third, that’s my phone! At the end of this video, Bob takes a pic of the scene to send to the HR department. It’s an HTC S620, or in the U.S. more likely known as the T-Mobile Dash. It’s got the HTC branding, so it must really be the S620. Except it’s running Windows Mobile 6 on it. Sometime in June HTC should be releasing the update so that all of us can run Windows Mobile 6 on our S620’s, and we won’t have to time travel like Marty… er… Bob and Doc to get our hands on it.

Very funny video. I just wish it was complete. Just like a Hollywood blockbuster, it ends with a cliffhanger. “Will Bob get the incriminating photos to HR in time?”

[Note: I edited this on 6/19/2007 to replace the original Soapbox video with a more complete YouTube one.]

^[1] If I’m being totally honest here, the idea that Microsoft was trying to get across with the misguided “Bob” was a good one — It just wasn’t executed in the right way. It was an early attempt at “ease of use” or a good “out-of-box experience” (OOBE) for novice end-users. A worthy goal that did manifest itself in later versions of Windows. Just not executed well with Bob.