This Year's Winners Include Microsoft, Adobe, Dymo, Palm, 2K, Verizon and Turbine

Michael L. Berman's Blog
www.scrippsnews.com
Jan. 14 , 2008

It's that time of year again. The votes are in and results for the 2008 Bermie Awards have been tabulated by an accounting firm that would prefer to remain anonymous. So, without further ado, can I have the envelopes, please.

The I Wish I'd Thought of That Award goes to the folks at Dymo, who came out with two innovative and "gotta have-it" products in 2007. The first was their Desktop Mailing Solution, which combines a LabelWriter Twin Turbo printer (for labels and stamps), a postage scale and software that reads from the scale and issues the correct postage. The second is the Disc Painter, which lets you create label designs for your writeable CDs and DVDs and literally paints them onto the label side of the disks.

The Most Ignored Product of the Year Award goes to Microsoft. Although their new operating system --- Windows Vista --- is a welcome change and has many improvements over Windows XP, only about 18 percent of PC users have made the switch.

The KISS (keep it simple stupid) Award goes to the folks at Verizon for finally realizing that there are cell phone users out there that just want to make phone calls. The new Coupe is a welcome addition for those of us that believe a phone should be a simple device for which you don't need a Master's Degree in geek gadetry to use.

The Online Game of the Year goes to Lord of the Rings Online from Turbine which is, by far, the best and most faithful to the to the trilogy LOTR game available to date. Also the graphics and attention to detail make it a bit more intriguing than the usual online games we've seen in the past few years.

The Where Is It Award is the second one for Microsoft. This could also be come the It's About Time Award once the boys from Redmond finally release the first service pack for Windows Vista.

The Game of the Year Award should rreally be renamed GAMES of the year. Two games, released for the Xbox 360, share the top honors - - - Halo3 from Bungie Games and Microsoft and Bioshock from Take-Two Interactive. Although both of these games are first-person shooters, they are unlike any you've ever played before. The graphics are awesome and gameplay is extremely addictive.

The Sports Game of the Year also goes to take-Two Interactive. This award used to go to EA Sports every year for Madden Football, but this year, Madden (Wham) got blitzed by the technical detail and great gameplay in the whole series of 2K sports games, ranging from football to baseball. New titles include All-Pro Football 2008, NHL 2K8 and NBA 2K8.

The Smarter Smartphone Award goes to Palm and Sprint for the Centro, which is actually a small version of Palm's popular Treo Smartphone. This new phone offers all of the features of the Treo in a much smaller, easier to handle format and at a fifth of the price.

The Office Suite of the Year Award also goes to Microsoft for doing an amazing job of retooling Microsoft Office. Microsoft Office 2007 is a complete upgrade of older versions, including a more tightly integrated interface linking all of the programs, a new and expanded ribbon displaying many of the tools we use most frequently.

The Graphics Suite of the Year Award goes to Adobe for its three suites of graphics programs - - - Creative Suite 3 Production Premium, Creative Suite 3 Design Premium and Creative Suite 3 Web Premium - - - aimed at different types of users. All of the suites feature completely upgraded versions of the most popular Adobe software, including Photoshop, Premier, Illustrator and Dreamweaver, and provide all of the tools you need to make them the most powerful graphics packages in the universe.

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