Microsofts attack at Apple.

http://daringfireball.net/2008/09/digging_deeper

Gruber sums up my feelings on the subject.

Lol
I’m a PC and I have a beard XD

I’m a Mac and have I have stable software.

@Theotherkid Haha nice

Huh. I actually kind of like that. Although, it has blatant “Microsoft cares about the environment” messages, which is kind of stupid but whatever.

Apple vs Microsoft aside.

I love this advert. This advert just made me smile. I don’t know why but it made me feel happy, I have a sore throat, I’ve done nothing all day, I feel tired and I’m cold, but this made me smile, I’m happy now.

I see nothing wrong with being the default, the norm. In this world you can not win. Nuh uh. There is no winning. Want to be with everyone else by using a PC. People hate you. Want to be entirely different and special and use Linux, people hate you. Sure the ‘advert’ may not be great for MS and the advertising, but it’s nice. :)

Now this was a direct stab at Apple! Notice how in the Mac ads they say “Hi, I’m a Mac. And I’m a Pc?”

My memory is a little fuzzy, but there are basically two types of ads. I think the first is called “something new.” The other (I’m sure) is called “me too.” Neither is inherently better in terms of ad strategy, but “me too” ads generally reflect an acknowledgment that the brand is not top of mind in its category. The reality is that Microsoft products (except iPod/Zune of course) are everywhere three times over relative to Apple, but in public discourse or the public sphere (which is starting to reflect in market share) Apple has the lead and everyone else (HP for example with their most recent “me too” take on iLife-like functionality) is second.

My other reflection is that advertising is done via emotion and fact and most contemporary advertising theory supports that the emotional drive to make a purchase decision supersedes fact (think auto advertisements). Probably these new ads will boost Microsoft’s market share (or at least stabilize it), but it’s definitely a change from the last decade or so of their advertising. Apple, on the other hand, has nearly always relied on selling the emotional connection to their products as well as personification/anthropomorphing of their products (and generally backed up the emotional promise with better than average functionality/reliability).

So I see it as a “me too” ad. I’ve never found Microsoft products “cool” or anything more than functional. The sheer penetration of their platforms is impressive, though, and obviously revolutionized personal computing. In my mind, they’d need to do a lot more, though, to surpass Apple, and Vista has definitely not helped their effort.

Seems a little defensive.
Though I chuckle every time that guys says he turns number two into energy.
Yeah, I’m pretty mature.

I wonder how Apple will respond to this. This should be interesting

Pix: Apple doesn’t need to respond to this.
They’re so way ahead of the game.

@Nimis yeah but that would be fun to watch.

“I’m a PC but I made this advertisement using not one, but two competing products, and I used an advertising company that has been featured on Apple.com publicly stating how useful Macs are.” Irony (patent pending).

I actually liked it a lot. It showed that people can do a great deal of the same things on a PC that they can a Mac. I thought it was funny that they showed email address’ for some of the people in the commercial – including Mr. Bill Gates – as it seemed they were trying to show people, “Here we are. You can reach out to us and we care.” I think it was very effective. I think that they should have started this ad campaign before they started their Mojave Experiment ad’s. I think it would have added credibility.

As far as stability goes, I own a brand new (3 months old) Macbook Pro, and 2 custom towers – one with XP Pro and one with Ubuntu. My XP machine crashed on me yesterday because my drivers weren’t up to date for my video card and the game I was trying to run kept having runtime errors. OSX and Linux take care of this problem for you by downloading the newest updates or at least notifying you of them. However MS does not. But, that has been my ONLY downtime in a year. 1 crash. And I am not out of the norm. More often than not computer crashes are user errors (virus’, spyware, etc.). This is another area where OSX and Linux shine. And for the record aside from Vista’s initial issues and it’s HUGE install size (8gb for Ultimate) it’s actually pretty nice.

I don’t find that ironic bluemukaki. It’s not uncommon for advertising, design, artistic, movie and creative industries to use Mac’s, MS has no control over what the external companies use to develop these things. I see nothing wrong with it, Apple are a obvious competiter to Microsoft and the computer manufactureres.I don’t see why people get up in arms about this. Nobody ever seems to be too bothered about how much MasOS has taken so much from UNIX, I’m not bothered I’m just pointing it out. There are so many cross overs in the computer market. I just wished people weren’t so big headed about it.

No I mean isn’t it ironic that while trying to improve their brand by making it ‘hip’ they’ve taken two of their competitors who both have a strong artistic user-base and used their products to make an ad saying how creative and ‘wall-less’ you can be. Sure it makes sense to produce an advert on a Mac using Adobe software, but its like advertising a ladder’s height by going up in a scissor-lift.

I don’t understand what taking ideas from UNIX (which is what Mac OS X is by the way) has to do with advertising… to rebut your point anyway, Apple take ideas from Linux and they make them consumer-friendly, improve them or at least don’t make them worse. Microsoft take from both Apple and Linux developers and make the result worse, anti-competitive and then market it as if they are innovating.

Ahem… OS X is based off of BSD (using FreeBSD as their reference.) and Mach 3.0. Not Unix or Linux (unless you’re using the term Unix in the same way as you’d use *Nix, which then it is the same, or if you consider the Kernel the OS which is improper.). BSD is a derivative of Unix, much like Linux, and OS X is a *Nix environment.

Ok my bad, I got my facts distorted :) Thanks for the corrections. What I was pointing out is that software and hardware mixes together all over the world and there’s no way of avoiding one way or another, therefore there is nothing really that ironic or funny about an advert being made from a leading industry product, Apple supported or not.

However, that advert isn’t showing how ‘creative’ you can be, because how creative is selling fish? Or having a beard? Or saving polar bears? I interpret the advert as just showing that it isn’t your computer that decides your lifestyle. We are individual people, human beings (not a human doing, not a human thinking, a human being).

I don’t know about you, but having a computer that is ‘hip’ isn’t high up in my list of things I want.

By the way tWrex, I never said what OSX was based on, just about what it’s taken from, which as that page shows, UNIX technology ;) but I see entirely where you’re coming from and it’s interesting to know :)

@Skyrail Good points and well made. I agree with your insights about the idea that they’re trying to portray people that use it as individual people. Maybe it’s because they feel that people associate MS or Windows with Corporations and they want to show that it’s for the everyday person as well – even though they have a much larger penetration in the home than Apple does.

My points were not actually directed at you. They were more directed at bluemukaki and really it was just an opportunity for me to show off how nerdy I really am. Still not sure if that’s good or bad. =)

Personally I think it is a cool ad.

I have nothing against PCs. The ad shows there are a lot of users in a lot of fields on a lot of levels.

I also like the one that reintroduces Vista as a new op system and show them its really vista.

now I am staying with mac for 95% of my computing because I prefer mac. But still i think PC finally got their shit together.

Now they need to get some stores out there.

I just visited Microsoft’s site today and look what I was greeted with…

Could Microsoft be trying to make Safari look bad?! :O