It is lodged deep in the nature of advertising and marketing people that they will endlessly escalate their craft, and it is lodged deep in the nature of advertising and marketing that their craft is dissociating the content of their marketing materials as far as possible from the product they are actually marketing. It may seem logically impossible for them to “escalate endlessly”, in the same sense that “sustainable growth” is a paradox; and yet after decades of exponential acceleration away from any sane kernel of connection between the advertising and the advertised, we observe still more acceleration.

It may not be appropriate to propose milestones in any exponential growth curve, as far as I know it’s impossible to identify inflection points unless you believe the damn thing will actually level off and think you know where, and I’m not convinced of the first and wouldn’t dream of guessing at the latter. But surely this deserves some recognition as, on an absolute scale, utterly nuts:

the website for Windows Vista.

What in the name of all that’s sane and holy does that beautiful photograph have to do with a computer operating system?