Wonder of wonders, Microsoft produces a decent set of ads

[jducoeur]

A couple of days ago, Microsoft threw in the towel and pulled the cryptic Seinfeld / Gates ad campaign. It was a tacit admission that leaving the viewing audience with a collective "WTF?" wasn't exactly the image they needed to project. (Oh, they're claiming that they planned it this way all along, but pretty much nobody believes it.)

Yesterday, they unveiled the new ads replacing them, and they're surprisingly well-done. They hit exactly the right note, not even talking about Apple but going headfirst against the PC stereotype that the Mac ads have so brilliantly set up. The implicit message is that most people are "PCs", not "Macs" -- a very smart tactic to use against the cooler-than-thou Mac image that was already starting to get some backlash. They're also genuinely down-to-earth in a way that the head-scratchingly too-clever-by-half Seinfeld campaign wasn't.

All of which seems to show that, in advertising as in everything else, Microsoft *never* produces a decent 1.0 release. But they do tend to eventually get a clue...

Comments

[serakit.livejournal.com]

Does that mean it's hard to get a good computer that runs XP? I will not buy one with Vista...

[laurion]

Increasingly so. Microsoft licensing makes it so there's no difference to the Vendor what they ship with the machine, and most of them would rather be able to advertise the latest and *ahem* "greatest" OS. Some of them will honor a request to ship with XP even if they sell with Vista, makes no difference to them; it's allowed under the EULA, and the maker is getting paid either way. Dell has been doing this, so if you need to get a machine with XP in the near future, go ask them about it.

Fortunately, it's still very easy to get computers that run other excellent operating systems. Of course, with a Mac laptop at home and a Dell laptop with Ubuntu at work, I _might_ be biased.