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Why they bother spending $300 Million dollars on an ad campaign when they could be using it to improve windows I have no idea…

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/18/business/media/18adco.html?_r=2&oref=slogin

Why they bother spending $300 Million dollars on an ad campaign when they could be using it to improve windows I have no idea…

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/18/business/media/18adco.html?_r=2&oref=slogin

There trying to promote PC with windows, probably becuase more are switching to MAC or Linux, even myself I’m thinking of getting of a MAC or maby try linux. Try something new.

Mac kicks Window’s arse.

I would have switched tommorow if I could afford it.

The new MS ads with Seinfeld are long, pointless, and not even remotely funny. They suggest we should use PC just because Gates buys shoes with Seinfeld while putting up with his sadly washed-up brand of humor. Which is to say that there is no reason to use a PC. $300 million to tell us nothing about PC? Ridiculous…

With Microsoft’s money, you don’t really have to choose.

While it is popular to dog Vista, I found that it runs quite nicely… on my MacBook Pro.  OS X and Windows still have a lot they could learn from each other.

I’m not dogging Vista, just this awkward campaign. Apparently it’s been the laughing stock in the business world too. Microsoft’s excuse has been that “[they are] just exploring their options.”

I’m neutral on the Seinfeld commercials, and while the media focus has been on the fake “PC Guy”, he’s on for just a couple seconds at the start of a great commercial.  As “their options” go, all three commercials have been vast improvements over the horrendously bland and/or geeky Microsoft commercials of yore.

For that matter, all three of them are better than half of the ads Apple puts out.  The latest Mac and PC ads have none of the dialogue of the originals, they stay pretty close to home on the “Vista is sux” bandwagon.  And the guy who couldn’t find a phone with email and a camera until he got an iPhone?  Please.

Why they bother spending $300 Million dollars on an ad campaign when they could be using it to improve windows I have no idea…

You’re assuming that spending more money on Windows would automatically make it a better OS. I’m pretty sure Microsoft is at the point of rapidly diminishing returns when it comes to throwing money at the problems of their OS.

The real problem with their attempts at advertising is that their product doesn’t say anything special, so their advertising either comes off as pretentious or vapid. John Gruber, god-king of the Apple talking heads, said this of the abortive Seinfeld campaign:

The odd saga of Microsoft’s nascent $300 million rebranding campaign brings to mind this nugget of genius from Paul Rand:

“A logo is less important than the product it signifies; what it represents is more important than what it looks like.”

This holds true not just for logo marks specifically, but also in the broader, more abstract sense of brands in general. No brand is better or stronger than the products and experiences it represents. A good brand is strong because it is true, not because it is clever.

Link

The full opinion takes only a few minutes to read, and he’s definitely right on the money.

The full opinion takes only a few minutes to read, and he’s definitely right on the money.

No he’s not. Money are not building software, people are. $300kk is 1/3-1/5 of the salaries for employees newely hired in 2007, excluding benefits, excluding salaries for the existing employees. This is change. Your scale is different than MS’s. MS, just like any other company, needs talent. There were many, many people who thought that extra $$$ will make their product better. Most of them failed.

I agree with champs

vista is utter crap. I hate answering questions about it, esp relating to people moving from XP to vista.

[I’m not trying to turn this into a Vista debate thread]

I’m a Mac user and I love my Mac. Lately I haven’t been using Mac though (cause they don’t have drivers for my GTX 280).

My final decision on Vista is… well put it this way - I run Vista. I don’t recommend it for everyone, but it has its advantages and disadvantages. First off, Vista Ultimate is the only Vista to run IMO. If you’re a gamer, Vista is great with its support for DirectX 10. If you turn off the preposterous features such as background defrag and all their redundant services it runs pretty well. A few bug fixes to iron out, but definitely nothing I can’t live with. XP still has its share of bugs.

One thing I like a lot about Vista is the way it finds pretty much every driver for every device you have installed/connected. It’s a step up from XP in that sense for sure.

Operating systems still piss me off though. Even Mac has its share of bugs. I haven’t used Leopard for a while but when it first came out in November 2007 it crashed all the time (kernel panic - equivalent to windows blue screen).

Basically, Vista is not so bad if you have a mean rig to run it on and you have it configured correctly. At this point, it’s definitely got more support than XP. Unless you run Vista 64, like me :(

No he’s not. Money are not building software, people are. $300kk is 1/3-1/5 of the salaries for employees newely hired in 2007, excluding benefits, excluding salaries for the existing employees. This is change. Your scale is different than MS’s. MS, just like any other company, needs talent. There were many, many people who thought that extra $$$ will make their product better. Most of them failed.

I’m not sure what you’re responding to; Gruber’s point is that Microsoft is attempting to define themselves as a unique specialty brand like Apple: they’re trying to create a Microsoft culture similar to Apple culture or people who get really excited (and communicate on internet forums) about their Saab. The problem is that Windows and Office are so gigantic and monolithic that they lack the necessary flavor to inspire the development of that culture on a broad scale.

It’s my opinion that throwing more money at Windows won’t make it a better operating system. Microsoft already has huge development teams devoted to Windows 7 and has the opportunity to induct talent from all over the planet, that’s not the point. Adding more developers introduces the law of diminishing returns in the form of the myth of the man-month; as you add more and more hands to work on a piece of software, you introduce more vectors for inefficiency and more opportunities for over-engineering.

At the same time, Microsoft has the size and capital to spend hundreds of millions on a marketing campaign without too much worry, especially now that they’re trying pretty hard to push the now-not-half-baked Vista SP1 out the door. From what I’ve read and heard, SP1 actually smooths over a lot of the roughest patches of Vista’s problems, even if it does relatively little to its annoyances.