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Microsoft Tries a New Ad Agency
Posted by
kdawson
on Fri Aug 08, 2008 09:17 AM
from the pigs-and-lipstick dept.
from the pigs-and-lipstick dept.
Diomidis Spinellis writes "An article in this week's Economist outlines Microsoft's marketing response to Vista's travails and Apple's hip Get a Mac campaign. Describing the recent Mojave Experiment as 'Microsoft at its worst,' the article's writer wonders whether hiring a new hot ad agency, Crispin Porter + Bogusky, to put together a $300m campaign can make Microsoft look cool. Can money buy you love?"
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"Can money buy you love?" (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:"Can money buy you love?" (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Re:"Can money buy you love?" (Score:5, Insightful)
money == love
love == no sex
Hence the "Ex".
Parent
Re:$300 Mil to spend polishing... (Score:3, Funny)
Nah. That's where you underestimate the power of a really good agency.
Everyone else deals in plain, possibly even frozen bull turds as you describe. Skip that.
Now we can offer New, Proprietary Mixed-Species Cross Kingdom Blend Biological Debris which includes features such as High-Pigment Proportional Density which comes from a specially grown Archaeopteryx reconstructed from an Intelligently Designed matrix of historical remains.
Re:No, fake friends are obvious. (Score:5, Insightful)
That's just a twitter sockpuppet you're responding to.
But, to respond to you... I too use Microsoft products all over the place though I use Linux for work mostly. I think that this is wasted money on Microsoft's part in that they probably really don't need to bother with it. Walk out on the local corner and ask people if they know who made their operating system and I suspect 90% of them will say Microsoft. 5% will say Windows. I imagine the remainder will be people who have no idea what you speak of or use something other than Windows.
I suspect, strongly, that Microsoft can weather several horrific OSes in a row without actually having to worry too much. Average Joe doesn't care too much what is on his system, so long as he got it cheap from Wal-Mart.
Vista, much as we love to hate it here, isn't that bad with SP1 installed.
I remember the people bleating about how they'd never put XP on their machines.
How they were sticking with 98se forever.
They say the same thing about Vista now. Then again, Vista kind of sort of sucked more than XP did when it first came down the pipes.
Parent
Re:No, fake friends are obvious. (Score:4, Interesting)
I remember when XP came out. I knew it had problems and said I would stick with 98SE.
I also knew that XP had benefits, and that once the problems were (mostly) worked out, I would make the switch. I said that, too.
The big difference between then and now is that Vista offers me minimal benefits, and builds in DRM and other stuff that actually makes it more difficult to use my oomputer the way I want.
I knew I would eventually switch to XP, though I still resent the CPU and RAM upgrades I had to do to get the same performance I had been getting under 98SE. I waited 2 years, but I made the move. I know that I will NOT move to Vista, just as I knew I would never make the move to WinMe. XP made major changes that brought me real benefits compared to 98SE where WinMe did not. Vista (like WinMe) offers me no major benefits and comes with many problems, even after SP1.
The big difference between then and now, however, is that all indications then were that XP would eventually be a big improvement over 98SE, and a REALLY BIG improvement over the failure that was WinMe. I look at everything being said about Windows 7 and I see Vista 2.0, not a new OS that offers me major benefits. I avoided WinMe and I will avoid Vista. I knew early on that I would eventually switch to XP, but at this point I don't see myself switching to Windows 7. Unless Win7 develops into something that a) offers me major benefits and b) does not restrict my use of my computer, I will avoid it as well.
The BIGGEST difference between then and now, however, is that now I have many well-developed alternatives to Windows, including Mac and several *nix systems. I may lose some software options, but I believe it would be worth it to keep my tech freedom.
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Competiton everywhere for them. (Score:5, Interesting)
The Zune example is instructive. Microsoft spent buckets of cash promoting the Zune but iPod still dominates. There's only so much you can do with advertising and anti-competitive practices to make up for a complete lack of quality. Ultimately, Vista costs more than all it's competitors but does less and does it poorly. There's no way to make that look sexy.
There's a public perception shift going on here. M$ marketing pigeon holed Mac into a "creative type" niche and GNU/Linux into a "geek" hole. With Vista trying to be both "cool" and "geeky" people are realizing that Windows was never "practical" either. With M$ itself hyping ISO standards, the file format wars are finally over and real standards like ODF are going to win. Mac and GNU/Linux will then be for people who just want to get their work done. Most Mac and GNU/Linux users have known this a long time, but M$'s failed marketing is making that opinion universal.
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Re:Competiton everywhere for them. (Score:4, Interesting)
But someone who bought their computer in 2001 will pay the "Microsoft Tax" of around $80 (I do love how you don't use the OEM prices for Windows which can be gotten at NewEgg and most other online retailers.) And after that, they could spend $200 on Vista Ultimate.
On the other hand, if the Mac guy wants to keep up with the joneses, he has to buy OS X, 10.1, 10.2, 10.3, 10.4, 10.5.
Your argument is a straw man, for using prices most people never pay: from what I've seen with non-technical people, they won't ever upgrade their OS. They just buy a new computer. And this is true for Mac OS users as well, though I think to a lesser extent. I would wager the average Apple user spends more on their OS than the average Windows user merely because I know people who have computers from 2001/2002 that are running Windows XP who have no inclination to upgrade. So they spent around $80 on the OS. The sheer number of these people relative to the number of people who I know who have chosen to upgrade their machine to Vista at any point suggests something not quite anecdotal, though not quite data yet :)
Let's keep off the strawmen shall we though? I mean, neither argument is valid so the jury is out until someone actually performs a study.
Parent
Re:Software should not cost more than hardware. (Score:5, Interesting)
I don't understand the Windows hate - XP's a perfectly decent product. Same with MS Office. I run either Windows or Linux depending on what I'm doing. I can understand disliking MS because of their business tactics, but that doesn't imply that everything they make is crap. It seems that a lot of Windows bashers are just looking at Linux/Mac with rose colored glasses or knocking points off of Windows because of MS-hate.
I use Windows at work:
1) The company pays for it
2) They buy the software
3) It works just fine and is easy to network with other company resources
4) I like MS Office better than Open Office. OO is fine, but there are small differences that annoy me.
5) Even if I wanted to switch, they wouldn't let me because a lot of the things they use don't have Linux counterparts that are able to interact
You can argue that my company should switch, but that's not up to me. And transitioning more than 100 thousand employees would be pretty painful, even if done in small pieces. That's beyond my pay grade, so I won't debate on whether that would be a good move for them or not - I just do what works for me.
I use Windows at home when doing anything multimedia intensive - Music, movies, DVR, pr0n, games, etc. It has wide support, nice, free (except for requiring a commercial OS) applications for handling music/movies, and games are always tuned first to work with Windows with everything else as a side-note. The XP Professional install cost me ~$80 OEM and MS Office cost me $20 thanks to my company kicking in for any of us that want to use it at home. So, a ~$100 price tag for a good OS with good software. I don't remember what I paid for my copy of Paint Shop Pro 8, but it wasn't a lot (~$30?) and has been serving my image manipulation needs very well for several years. Irfanview is also an excellent, free tool for browsing. I don't know what you're shelling out $700 for. [As a side note, I haven't actually gamed in some time - Young kids pretty much wiped out my gamer side, but I assume that XP is still a solid platform for modern games.]
I also use Linux at home. Slackware was easy to install and runs great. Unfortunately, there are no drivers for some of my hardware, so I lose access to a lot of stuff that I use regularly under Windows. But, it's a great coding environment - So when I want to get serious and knock out some code to support my various hobbies, I boot Linux.
If I was serious about movie/sound editing and such, I might consider Mac as I've heard it's good with that stuff. I've heard it's good for coding too. But, my dual-boot machine supports all my needs just fine so I'll stick with it.
Different tools for different applications. I'm neither MS/Linux/Apple fanboi nor too proud to sleep around on my OSes, so I use the tools I feel meet my needs best in whatever situation I'm in.
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Re:Software should not cost more than hardware. (Score:5, Insightful)
Here are my issues with Windows and why I personally don't use it.
1. No native package management. With Linux, I just click on Synaptic, type what I'm looking for in the Search box, check it and hit apply. Done. Windows? Ha.
The way XP accommodates uninstallations is comparable to what you describe, not nearly as effective as Synaptic, but I think it's fair for an OS to only be responsible for removing software, and the software developers be responsible for its installation. XP is also not aimed at a market that installs/uninstalls software on a daily basis.
1a. apt-get update && apt-get upgrade. Self-explanatory (I hope).
The only thing self-explanatory about that is how linux users have their own language, further reinforcing how much an investment of time it is to learn to use it.
2. Linux viruses, something like zero. Windows, last time I checked numbered in the millions. Maybe that is Microsoft's fault, maybe it isn't. Who knows. I don't really care.
I haven't heard a first-hand account of any XP user I know suffering any significant inconvenience from a virus having installed free anti-virus software (Avast).
3. When I've installed Windows, it always turned into a driver and software hunt odyssey. Honestly, you get sick of that after a while. I kind of like taking the 20-30 minutes to install Linux and everything just working. I know there are a plethora of horror stories about Linux not working on a particular hardware set. In the last several years, I have had Linux choke on 1 piece of hardware. It was a sis190 ethernet adapter of all things. Upgraded the kernel, fixed. Took maybe an hour.
How long did it take you to learn to install linux? Are you willing to spend that time over and over teaching XP users how to install linux? The primary advantage of XP is how widespread the knowledge base is. Linux information is widely accessible too, but not necessarily from someone across the street. I consider learning a new OS to be as big a waste of time as taking too long to install one I already know.
4. Screen, elinks, and rtorrent. I work on the road a lot and I like my Battlestar Galactica's and my Heroes, etc. waiting on me when I get home. I could do that with windows with remote desktop, only problem is, my server doesn't have a graphics card and last I checked, XP won't run without one. Correct me if I'm wrong. Linux, on the other hand, is more than happy to practically run on a ham sandwich. That was a joke but you get the point.
I hope you're not suggesting that there is no way to pirate videos remotely on an XP box. Not only is it done by millions of people daily, but it's a rather dubious feature by which an OS should be qualified!
5. The infinite customizability of KDE. I like my desktop a certain way. I'm sure there is a way to move the minimize button into the top left corner in windows so you can just shoot the mouse over there and minimize your window. I just haven't taken the time to figure it out. I'm also sure there is a way to hold down the alt and the mouse keys to resize and move windows. Also, an easy button to click to make a window stay on top or bottom. I can easily do all of that and much more in KDE. How about Windows?
XP's appearance and functionality is completely customizable. It requires some scripting, but there are countless mods to be found with a quick Google search, much easier than learning a new OS.
6. On my core 2 duo with 2 gigs of RAM, when I click on an icon or start a program from the command line, things happen practically instantly. This thing came with Vista so I decided I would at least see what I would miss when I wiped it. It was the slowest most horrible OS I have ever used. I would use Windows Me before I would use Vista. In short, I have little pati
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Yes (Score:3, Funny)
It seems to me (Score:5, Insightful)
It seems to me that Crispin Porter + Bogusky is using their new Microsoft account to make a lot of publicity for themselves, given that Fast Company [fastcompany.com] just did a cover article on their acquisition of the Microsoft account.
Re:It seems to me (Score:5, Insightful)
Aha! See how good Crispin Porter + Bogusky is? They've just managed to get their name recognition to soar dramatically in a short period of time!
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Re:It seems to me (Score:5, Interesting)
That may explain why Keller and Reilly are today using their team as an early focus group for learning how to persuade Mac lovers to embrace Windows. "You've got a lot of passionate Mac people in here, and they've got to get their head around this thing -- why Windows is genius," says Keller. He and Reilly have outfitted their shared office (inherited from Bogusky) with an Xbox 360, which they've been using as a wireless hub. But their joint desk also holds two ultrathin MacBook Airs. When I ask if they're making their team get rid of their iPods and PowerBooks, Reilly responds, "It's not a matter of forcing people. It's getting them to want to use it. If you can't, you're not going to do great advertising."
So they may be able to give them up internally to keep the account/their jobs, but I'd be surprised if they are very successful at this campaign. Then again, since Vista isn't as bad as it was at it's launch and the real problems with it such as DRM/protected path most people don't understand or care about, maybe they have a chance to at least stem the tide.
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Bogusky? (Score:3, Funny)
Really? Bogusky? Bogus-ky? Next we'll be told that Microsoft's lawyers are going to be Grabbit and Runne.
Re:Bogusky? (Score:4, Funny)
Nope, they hired Dewey, Cheatam and Howe.
Parent
Re:Bogusky? (Score:5, Funny)
Don't be silly. Everyone knows they're busy representing SCO.
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They need to hire psyop... (Score:3, Funny)
Anyone who can make this [psyop.tv] look cool should be able to sell Vista.
'Mojave experiment' ads a rip-off of the 70's (Score:5, Funny)
When looking at those interviews, I was waiting for a narrator to say to me "We've secretly replaced this man's blood with Folger's Crystals!" man: "AIIEEAAAAHAHHH!!"
Love (Score:5, Funny)
Can money buy you love?
Probably, but I'm still going to wait for Love SP2.
$300M (Score:5, Insightful)
I know this is nothing compared to the vast costs for developing Vista, but it makes one wonder... If Microsoft can't build a better product by throwing vast sums of money at it, is there any hope they can build a better image the same way?
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
You'd be surprised how many people are convinced that Macs are amazing and Vista is shite without any firsthand experience of either; their opinions based solely on Apple's (very successful) TV commercial campaign.
Re:$300M (Score:5, Insightful)
The difference, though, is that people who have frequently used both often tend to develop that exact same opinion. So the marketing really isn't trying to spin much, which makes it even more sticky.
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Re:$300M (Score:4, Insightful)
Precisely.
The Mojave ad features a bunch of (what look to be) regular joes getting hoodwinked into using Vista. The obvious problem is that no one cares what Joe Sixpack thinks of Vista... that's not where most people get their information. Most get it from well-informed users using the big voices of weblogs, magazines, and newspapers. And those voices come down almost unanimously against Vista, with mountains of backing evidence.
- David Stein
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Re:$300M (Score:5, Insightful)
Apple's genius is in deciding what to take out, not what to put in. They don't provide mp3 players that look like your TV's remote control with 200 buttons and dozens of modes. They provide products that give you an intuitive, tactile sense of what you're doing when using their product. Since the iPod, their ads tend to reflect that minimalism as well. It doesn't work for anyone-- some people don't feel like they're getting their money's worth of buttons on an Apple product. But a lot of people find it valuable.
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Re:$300M (Score:5, Interesting)
Well yeah because they're hiring someone else to do it.
Waggener Edstrom, their long-time PR company, was run by Pam Edstrom. She's married to Ballmer. See any connection in the failures here? Some of their staff are wonderful, while others are empty chairs. Hiring someone else to do the work might also mean that they'd have to listen to someone outside of their cabal.
Perish the thought.
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Good marketing trumps quality product (Score:5, Insightful)
A clever and solid marketing campaign will trump a quality product if enough money is thrown at the problem. It's unfortunate and sad but that's the way the cookie crumbles.
Re:Good marketing trumps quality product (Score:5, Insightful)
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Love? (Score:4, Funny)
Just stop the pretense (Score:5, Funny)
MAC: Hi, I'm a Mac.
BILL: Hi, I'm Bill gates. I'm a billionaire and one of the richest men in the world. I have power beyond anything you can imagine.
MAC: Um...
(Gates pulls out a pistol and shoots Mac in the head. Mac falls to the ground in a vast pool of blood and gore)
BILL: I can do that to your family and never worry about any sort of prosecution ever penetrating my vast army of lawyers. I can topple our government with a set of well placed bribes, or push the global economy into a depression. Buy Vista or I'll make all your lives a fucking nightmare from which you'll never awaken. It's the lesser of two evils, believe me. I wouldn't lie to you because I don't have to.
MAC: *gurgle*
(Bill puts three more rounds into Mac)
BILL: That was your wife and two kids, bitches. capisca?
Re:Just stop the pretense (Score:4, Funny)
The trouble is that this is the wrong way round...
Bill Gates always comes across, to me anyway, as a fairly likeable, if insanely rich, geek. Whereas Steve Jobs comes across as a psychopathic megalomaniac who would sell his children to a Gap sweatshop if he thought it would help sell more iPhones.
I've always imagined Bill's house as a nice secluded ranch somewhere, where he spends most of his time silently sitting with his face bathed only the glow from the 3 monitors in front of him. Steve Jobs on the other hand would have a lair rather than a house. A place where he can constantly rage against the world, formulating ever more devious plans for world domination whilst feeding those employees who disappoint to his pet pirhanas. Think Hank Scorpio, but less polite.
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What's with the "signed" tag (Score:5, Insightful)
signed? (Score:3, Insightful)
What does the "signed" tag mean and why is it on so many articles?
here's microsofts newest try (Score:5, Funny)
http://www.algorithman.de/storage/new_vista_ad.jpg [algorithman.de]
Go Ahead, Make Fun... (Score:4, Informative)
...but it was these guys that made the "Un-pimp My Ride" commercials for Volkswagen... ...and because you wanna watch 'em, here's the first [youtube.com], second [youtube.com] and third [youtube.com] of those...
Did it really fail? (Score:3, Insightful)
Not only did it get the headlines in most major news sources but it opened up a lot of discussion about Vista. There's a whole load of FUD that is either overblown (games performance was mostly down to poor drivers, the performance difference is very minor compared to XP) or a bunch of rubbish (zomg! MS will delete my MP3's and DRM everything!). Just look at slashdot discussions relating to the ads, there were more posts defending the OS by people who regularly use it than slating it.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Why the assumption that the Mojave experiment campaign was a failure?
I've never heard of it until now.
Re:Did it really fail? (Score:5, Insightful)
Unlike the Pepsi Challenges, or even the Folger's Crystals ads, this was not comparing two products from different companies and trying to convince you to switch, but rather the exact same product from the same company, ie "perceived Vista" vs "real Vista".
For instance, in the Pepsi Challenge, the message was that Pepsi tastes better than Coke, maybe you should drink Pepsi from now on. In the Folger's case, the message was that cheap convenient coffee is just as good as fancy restaurant coffee.
The only message in the Mojave experiment was "you're ignorant about the features of our products - you need to pay better attention".
Parent
Microsoft's latest slogan (Score:5, Funny)
I'll reckon they'll go with a dirty-tricks FUD campaign. For example:
These threats will attempt to be carried out by Steve Ballmer disguised in a ski mask and a shirt saying "I AM NOT THAT DANCE MONKEY BOY OFF YOUTUBE."
Truth in advertising (Score:4, Funny)
It could work if this is the company that did commercials for Pontiac, Ford, Chevy, and Schlitz.
"At Ford, quality is job one!" Poor quality, their work is cut our for them
"Pontiac: we build excitement!" Bad brakes, poor handling
"Chevy: Like a rock!" Damned thing won't start.
"When you're out of Schlitz, you're out of beer." The stuff's so nasty that nobody will drink it if there's any other brand in the fridge.
So following these fine examples of truthful ads, I suggest to Microsoft:
"Vista: Bigger and badder than ever!"
"Linux runs on supercompuers. Vista runs on your computer."
"Macs are for rich little girls"
"In your heart, you know Vista's right" (borrowing from Richard Nixon's sucessful right wing campaign ad
"Vista: Because nobody ever got fired for buying Microsoft!"
Prove to me advertising works... (Score:3, Insightful)
in the computer business.
Computers seem to be bought for two reasons - work and play.
When a computer is bought for work - technical necessity dictates what you buy. If your livelihood depends on that machine, you are going to buy only what works - no more, no less.
When a computer is bought for play - word of mouth is the primary motivator. Your friend loves his/her new Mac and all the cool things it can do - you see it, you like it, you buy it.
Neither of these situations are heavily influenced by marketing. You'd think the brains in Redmond would realize this.
-ted
Burson-Marsteller, Mark Penn, and Hillary Clinton (Score:5, Interesting)
The Economist did not mention the names of Microsoft's old and bad marketers? Chief among them, a company named Burson-Marsteller. CEO? Mark Penn. Strike a bell? He has spent most of the last year running Hillary Clinton's absolutely terrible campaign.
Does anyone else see the similarities between the "Hillary. She's inevitable." campaign and the "Vista. It's inevitable." campaign?
Yes, clearly the problem they have is advertising. (Score:5, Insightful)
I was reading an interview with Jobs and he started railing on why tech companies fail. His theory is that when you have a product that sells well, the salesmen think they're the ones made that happen. They were selling it, after all. Since these people take all the glory for the success [and although he didn't say it, are typically better at office politics than techs] they end up running the company. When that happens, they just stop listening to the engineers. And then when the product doesn't have any legs, they try to market their way out of the problem. After all, it's all about marketing, right? Cars, hamburgers, operating systems; they're all the same, proper marketing can sell anything, it's got nothing to do with the actual product.
After being asked about MS's recent floundering, he basically stated "Exactly, look who's running it, the sales guy."
The problem with Vista is Vista, not the Vista ad campaign. Does anyone here think sales would have increased if their posters were cooler? If you run ads saying "it's really not so bad", then it pretty much _is_ that bad.
And please, don't compare this with BK. BK's problem wasn't their product, it was visibility. That's something you CAN fix with an ad campaign. Everyone already knows about MS and Vista, so I really don't see how increasing visibility isn't going to help.
Good luck to the new guys! Especially with the Zune.
Maury
Re:Better investments (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
IMO, the Mojave Experiment was an amazing success. It cut right through the constant stream of baseless, bitter anti-MS FUD, and revealed it as the B.S. it really is.
They should be doing MORE commercials like that, not less. But obviously the article's writer... and a majority of the posters here... have an axe that must be ground at all costs, truth be damned. A successful version of Windows is their biggest threat, so
Re:Better investments (Score:5, Insightful)
The Mojave experiment proved that salesmen are good at selling things. The participants didn't explore the OS, they were given a guided tour.
If Microsoft were honest about wanting to "prove" how great Vista is to Vista critics, it should have just let them explore "Mojave" on their own and discover the "wow". Instead, they chose to use a cheap marketing gimmick. Why would anyone think that "experiment" was anything other than marketing theatre?
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Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Apple gives you XCode, perl, ruby, etc for free.
Microsoft gives you Notepad.
What are you talking about, man?
Re:apple on the downside (Score:5, Informative)
When my wife (a graphic designer) and I (a software engineer) first started seeing one another I convinced her to dump her Mac for Windows.
Windows 2000 was, truth be told, the best operating system for end users at that time. The Mac (pre OS X) was a piece of junk.
Fast forward today. We have 5 Mac's in the house. We have Linux on our servers. The sole remaining Windows machine has not been turned on for at least a few months.
Mac OS X has come a long way. It is everything a UNIX guy could evey have hoped for in a desktop/laptop OS (I started on Solaris).
The fact that it is shiny and cool is great bonus but that is not why I use it. I use it because it's better, it's easier, it's faster, and it's more robust then Vista.
Microsoft might claw it's way back. I hear Windows 2008 Server is a good product. But right now the Microsoft OS is the piece of junk, and Apple dominates in terms of product quality.
Parent
Re:It boils down to this... (Score:4, Insightful)
This is exactly right. I dusted off an old Win98 machine this year. Loaded Ubuntu on it for testing. My wife has since claimed this machine. It now has Hardy Heron on it, CD, 60GB HD, 1.2G AMD cpu, and until this week only 512MB RAM. She was very happy with it... except sometimes (rarely) when she got too much stuff running it would start swapping to disk and slow down a bit. Now It's got 1G RAM and she couldn't be happier. THAT would NEVER happen with Vista. No matter how polished a turd it is... I just won't buy it. Hell, Ubuntu HH will run on a i386 700Mhz laptop with only 256M RAM. Windows? not so much.
Parent
Re:I just saw one of these new ads... (Score:4, Insightful)
"they had a really nice OS with Windows XP"
Weren't we saying that about Windows 2000 when people hated XP not so long ago?
I use Vista at home. Its sole purpose is to play a couple of games, but to make the experience more tolerable I installed andlinux [andlinux.org] on it.
The problem with vistas are:
* UAC does not really solve security problems; it is just annoying. I turned that shit off since all I do is play games on it (and as soon as Cedega or Crossover Games runs it I'll be dumping Vista)
* Diagnostics is a little harder because more is hidden from the user
* WHY must drivers be signed? This is slowing adoption of 64-bit Windows -- and it certainly hasn't stopped the propogation of viruses, spyware, etc.
* It requires way too many resources for a home machine.
There are some things I really like about it, but the driver signing is a mistake (vendors won't keep their drivers updated with maintenance releases) and UAC is a flawed solution.
Also the UI is kind of weak. In MSIE 7 why did they do away with the menus? yeah it looks cleaner but it's more of a hassle to use. Some of the 3D effects are neat, but have they even looked at XGL/Compiz Fusion? I show people my Linux desktop and they ask me if I can put Linux on their systems, and they're amazed at what comes free with the OS (I do usually pay for the distro to support it though).
DRM slows networking to a crawl. Still. :(
Windows Media Center IS really nice though. Honestly, it's a hell of a lot better than Myth, because unlike Myth it just works. That is one thing Microsoft got right in both Vista and XP (Windows Media Center Edition).
I happened to catch a Vista ad when watching a movie on hulu.com last night. This older gentleman was going on and on about how great Vista was, etc. and I just kept thinking that it's either not a real-world user but "just" an actor reading a script, or it's a user who is BRAND NEW to Vista and is looking at it for the first time, and hasn't encountered any of the annoyances.
Oh sure, preinstalled it's _okay_ but why should the OS all by itself require 1GB of RAM (512 for basic)?
What I'd love to see Microsoft do is make the system less monolithic. Go back to the Windows/DOS model. Not the 16-bitness and instability of course, but separate the GUI from the underpinnings, and make loading the GUI optional (maybe powershell or SFU could be one of the interfaces you could boot to) to make diagnostics easier, and hell, even make the system lightweight for certain applications.
Go back to making the install program more modular - so you can pick and choose which components get installed.
Drop the driver signing, as it hasn't hindered crackers and virus authors at all, but has hindered 64-bit adoption.
Either drop backwards compatibility, or provide backwards compatibility via a VM which runs a stripped-down XP environment.
Fix the underlying security model. At security Microsoft still fails [slashdot.org]. UAC is a hack for perception purposes only, and while it MIGHT prevent idiots from shooting themselves in the foot, it does not solve any inherent security issues.
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