Microsoft Tries a New Ad Agency 372
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?"
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?
Re:"Can money buy you love?" (Score:3, Interesting)
If it's a hot 'n sweaty night with a someone you consider "love" then "yes".
Another word for sex is, after all, "making love". My newest girlfriend is great! Young (half my age), georgeous, great in bed, and costs less than dinner with a non-professional!
Re:'Mojave experiment' ads a rip-off of the 70's (Score:1, Interesting)
Heh, I think the most recent type of this ad is the one that Pizza Hut has for its new pasta dinners menu. Apparently New Yorkers, who are renowned pasta experts as the narrator tells us, were fooled into eating Pizza Hut's pasta instead of the expensive pasta dish they ordered from the menu of the swank restaurant they were in adn couldn't tell the difference. Of course, that doesn't really prove that PH's pasta is as good as restaurant pasta. It's more likely that New Yorkers don't really know shit about pasta--or, at least, any more than any other non-New Yorker does.
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.
I just saw one of these new ads... (Score:1, Interesting)
They ask people their opinions of Windows Vista, the people all respond negatively, then they ask them if they'd like to see Windows "Mojave" they show it to them and the people say "Wow this is cool, I need an upgrade and this look like it!"
They don't actually show the person using Vista or what features these people think are so great. Although if they gave the people Windows Vista for a week they'd grow to hate it, or at least that seems to be the case for everyone I know who just bought a computer with Vista. Our shop made a nice deal of money "upgrading" people's brand new computers to Windows XP. I even had a friend that begged me to install Vista on one of his computers even though I told him he's going to regret it. He wanted it because it was the newest thing and he thought it would be great. A month later he begged me to switch his computer and every other computer he bought with Vista to XP.
Microsoft is really trying to save Vista, they had a really nice OS with Windows XP and it seems so far they're too thick headed to realize that. I just hope they realize soon that they failed, they tried something new and nobody likes it.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Microsoft at its worst? (Score:2, Interesting)
Don't mod funny; it's a serious post.
That price is an illusion. (Score:-1, Interesting)
The Vista failure has created a lot of "great deals" like your dad's $400 desktop. HP took a loss on it that they would not have had if they did not have to pay a licensing fee or had not done as M$ said and try to sell nothing but Vista while 90% of people wanted nothing to do with Vista. Even then, your dad had to use a copy of Office from work to make the thing useful to him. That is a cost which non free software will continue to impose on hardware and it's not sustainable.
Even if Vista is the technical equivalent of free software, the cheaper and more flexible stack is going to win. This one is a no brainer and there's not way that an advertiser is going to convince people otherwise.
Re:Just stop the pretense (Score:3, Interesting)
I've always imagined Bill's house as a nice secluded ranch somewhere
Why imagine, when the power of the internet is at your fingertips?
More to the point, why revel in fantasy when truth is so easily obtained?
http://www.chuggnutt.com/2006/05/04/bill_gates_house.html [chuggnutt.com]
Re:Software should not cost more than hardware. (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
1a. apt-get update && apt-get upgrade. Self-explanatory (I hope).
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.
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.
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.
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?
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 patience for a multi-second disk churn before my programs start. Not a problem in Linux.
7. Konqueror. Only thing close in Windows that I have seen is Directory Opus. Konqueror is still better with more features, etc. and Directory Opus aint free.
8. Stability. Linux (properly configured by somebody that knows what they are doing) is rock solid. My server runs Debian etch. It has never so much as thought about crashing. Windows? I had an XP box running 24/7 a while back. It went down roughly once a week. This was on the exact same hardware as what Etch is on now. Maybe it was a fluke. Only thing I know is, when I rdesktop'ed into it, it was a crap shoot whether I'd get connection refused or not. That is infuriating. No longer a problem.
9. Out of the box, if someone is using a Linux computer, you can share their screen over a network. Windows XP, don't think so. You log into an XP box, the local screen logs out. And if the person is running XP home which most are, you can't even do remote terminal services at all. WTF?
I really could go on and on. But those are just a few of the reasons for my own personal brand of Windows hate. Flame away.
Re:It boils down to this... (Score:2, Interesting)
i386 700Mhz laptop with only 256M RAM.
How, pray tell, did you over-clock a 386 CPU to 700MHz?
Re:Did it really fail? Um, yeah! (Score:2, Interesting)
"...the performance difference is very minor compared to XP..."
EXACTLY.
Why is this "very minor" performance increase priced at $319.99 for the full Vista Ultimate version, or $219.99 for the upgrade version?!?
(Oh, and Best Buy has the upgrade version for sale at $189.99, or even cheaper, at only $69.99, if you buy a qualifying PC with Home Premium preloaded on it... and STILL, no one is buying it.)
Nope, you can't polish a turd - nor can you price it cheaper, evidently.
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.