I could give another reply in the Mac-vs-PC ad discussion, but instead I’m just going to link to this:
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Apple’s direct competition isn’t Microsoft but instead PC makers who sell computers running Windows.
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Flickr user LuisDS discovered metadata on the creative copy of the “stereotyped PC user” and other photos appearing on Microsoft’s “I’m a PC” website that reveal they were produced using Macs running Adobe Creative Suite 3.
Microsoft code monkeys scrubbed the identifying information from the website stills overnight.
Apart from the ha-ha-this-is-funny, here’s a question for you marketing people: how can you, as an advertising agency, be able to create compelling advertising for a product you yourself have rejected?
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Microsoft’s panicked reaction to these Seinfeld ads, yanking them from the air and severing ties with Seinfeld, isn’t because the ads were poorly received. And dropping these ads is a panicked reaction. Let’s not pretend it makes any sense that the Seinfeld spots were planned as a two-episode teaser all along. No one signs Jerry Seinfeld for $10 million in a much-heralded deal to make just two spots that only run for a grand total of two weeks. The most telling fact is that the firm that reached out to the media yesterday to explain that this sudden shift was supposedly the plan all along was not Crispin Porter, the advertising agency producing the campaign, but Waggener Edstrom, Microsoft’s PR firm. Advertising campaigns which are going according to plan do not need PR firms to assert such.
The reaction to the ads wasn’t bad, it was mixed (and/or baffled). But the spots were undeniably successful in one important regard: they were noticed and discussed. I suspect what sparked the panic is that the Seinfeld ads were too good, too accurate at capturing just what it is that Microsoft, as a company and brand, stands for: nothing.
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Remember those awful Microsoft ads with Jerry Seinfeld and Bill Gates? Well, now you can forget them. Microsoft flacks are desperately dialing reporters to spin them about “phase two” of the ad campaign — a phase, due to be announced tomorrow, which will drop the aging comic altogether. Microsoft’s version of the story: Redmond had always planned to drop Seinfeld. The awkward reality: The ads only reminded us how out of touch with consumers Microsoft is — and that Bill Gates’s company has millions of dollars to waste on hiring a has-been funnyman to keep him company.
And if you think they’re in a mess, get this:
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One new Microsoft commercial even begins with a company engineer who resembles John Hodgman, the comedian portraying the loser PC character in the Apple campaign. “Hello, I’m a PC,” the engineer says, echoing Mr. Hodgman’s recurring line, “and I’ve been made into a stereotype.”
What I’ve learned on marketing is that this is basically an explicit admission that Microsoft is the second-place brand. You never compare yourself to your competitors this way if you want to present yourself as number one.
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As part of Windows Vista’s $300 million marketing rehab, Microsoft Corp. will hire an initial wave of 155 “Windows Gurus” to walk around Best Buy and Circuit City stores, answer customer questions and defend Vista’s reputation against skeptics.
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One way Windows Gurus will differ from Apple Geniuses is that they are not intended to be sources of free technical support for existing Vista users.
“The guru role is to help sell Windows-based PCs. It is not to be an alternative tech support channel for Microsoft, as this has no financial return beyond improved customer satisfaction,” Baker said.
So the solution to people disliking Vista is…. get more people pitching the product at them.
Right. That’ll work.
I don’t get it. At all. This is how they’re going to improve the Microsoft image and sell lots of Vista?
That totally makes me want to go buy a copy of Vista..
Seinfeld was reportedly paid $10 million for his work in this series of ads…
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One developer we consulted about the issue noted, “consumers are being scammed by [PC] OEMs on a large scale. OEMs will encourage customers to upgrade a 2GB machine to 4GB, even though the usable RAM might be limited to 2.3GB. This is especially a problem on high-end gaming machines that have huge graphics cards as well as lots of RAM.”
“Microsoft even changed the way the OS reports the amount of RAM available; rumor is, due to pressure from OEMs,” the developer told us. “In Vista and prior, it reported usable RAM, while in SP1 they changed it to report installed RAM ignoring the fact that much of the RAM was unusable due to overlap with video memory.” And so many PC users are installing 4GB of RAM in their PCs and thinking that it is being used by the system, when in fact it is no more beneficial than if the RAM were simply poked halfway into the CD slot.
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The internet and computing has changed our lives so much so that many of us now spend hours and hours on our computers. We often forget what it is like outside. So why not get a window that looks just like Microsoft Windows, the operating system that most of us use?
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The one thing that old dialog had going for it, and I’m afraid that I never gave it its due credit,
is that when you hit the Search button, it would actually, you know, search your hard drive for files.Well, that’s all gone with the new & improved Search dialog. Now, you get a bunch of even stupider questions to look at, but when you hit the Search button it immediately comes up with this:
Nothing found for query “manage.py” because the folder F:\ is not indexed.
Roughly translated: “I didn’t find anything because I didn’t actually look.”
Microsoft has a patch out:
That’s an awful lot of megs, to be sure - just how many words are we talking about here? Microsoft explains:
The words “Friendster,” “Klum,” “Nazr,” “Obama,” and “Racicot” are not recognized when you check the spelling in Windows Vista and in Windows Server 2008.
Woa. That’s over 11 Mb per word. That’s what I call “bloat”!
(Oh, and you need to reboot after applying this patch - cool!)
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Believe it or not, that headline is not a typo. John Coyne, Systems Engineer in the OEM Embedded Devices group at Microsoft, has posted a quick blog entry that broke the bad news: as of November 1, 2008, Microsoft will no longer allow OEMs to license Windows for Workgroups 3.11 in the embedded channel. That’s exactly 15 years after it shipped in November 1993! Poor OEMs have so much to put up with these days; first Windows XP, and now this!
Windows for Workgroups 3.11 has of course been unavailable in retail and via client OEMs for years, but the embedded industry wanted to keep this ancient operating system around for much, much longer.
Well at least they can’t complain they haven’t had enough time to test their software on Windows 95 Embedded.
Yesterday I said the new Acrobat 9 for the Mac tried hard to emulate the beautiful windows experience Acrobat reader owners have.
Well, that was before I found out how great version 9 is for windows…
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Apple sells Mac OS X just as it retails music: it markets both products toward premium buyers at reasonable prices rather than attempting to force thieves to pay for a product they only want to steal. Microsoft failed in the music business with Windows Media because it tried to do just the opposite: force everyone to pay through the nose for expiring subscription music by using egregious DRM. Microsoft couldn’t force the thieves to stop stealing, and premium customers weren’t interested in being treated like thieves.
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There is a buy-it-now listing on eBay today where the seller is offering $630 in cash, which he will send electronically to the buyer through PayPal. The current price for this listing is $715. Why would someone pay $715 for $630 in cash? Well, you may have heard that Microsoft recently launched a ridiculous “cash back” promotion in the hopes of bribing Google customers to switch to Microsoft’s search engine, Live.com. Seems some resourceful people found a loophole in the system. Apparently, you can get a 10-35% cash back reward for all buy-it-now eBay purchases if you access the eBay listing through Live Search. So, people are simply selling cash and arbitraging the cash back reward. Your move, Ballmer.
All the reliability of Windows XP and the affordability of Apple hardware: Citrix
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And to think Microsoft used to be popular with the developer crowd…
Not anymore. A recent report from Evans Data shows fewer than one in 10 software developers writing applications for Windows Vista this year. Eight percent. This is perhaps made even worse by the corresponding data that shows 49 percent of developers writing applications for Windows XP.
Such appreciation for history is not likely to warm the cockles of Microsoft’s heart, especially when Linux is getting lots of love from developers (13 percent writing apps for it this year and 15.5 percent in 2009). The Mac? I don’t have any equivalent data via Evans Data. But the Mac OS has rocketed by 380 percent as a targeted development platform, Evans Data told Computerworld.
The numbers don’t get much better for Vista in 2009: 24 percent (compared with 29 percent for XP). That’s a big step up from 8 percent, but is it a sign of momentum to come or just a temporary stopgap while developers wait until Windows 7?
