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

The audacity of hope

[hudebnik.livejournal.com]

I'm teaching "Computer Programming for Non-Majors" this semester, as I frequently do. In past semesters, there have always been one or two geeky types with Macs, and perhaps one or two artsy types with Macs, among an ocean of Windows users. This semester, based on the students asking "does this program run on a Mac?" or bringing in their laptops for help with installation issues, I estimate that the proportion of Mac users is much higher than in previous years -- say, 25-35%.