Great moments in advertising
posted at 8:45 am on October 28, 2008 by Ed Morrissey
Microsoft has taken body blows over the last couple of years over its cheeseburger of an operating system, Vista. Its main competitor has a national advertising campaign exploiting its unpopularity with users, while many of their customers still refuse to upgrade from XP. The Vista brand has gotten so bad that Microsoft actually had to run an advertisement showing that they had to fool users into looking at Vista — not exactly a morale-builder for those stuck with their Vista operational issues.
Now Microsoft has announced the successors to Vista, due out over the next two years, Azure and Windows 7. Unfortunately, on the same article reporting this development, one of Microsoft’s partners ran this ad:
What are you waiting for? Azure or Windows 7, now that we know they’re just around the corner. Why would anyone “make the move to Windows Vista with confidence” when even Microsoft isn’t confident in Vista? The advertisers don’t have a lot of say about which ads get which placement, but one would figure that Microsoft had informed Dell that a new OS was about to be announced — and maybe Dell should have quit asking consumers to stop waiting for Vista when they may as well wait for Azure or 7.
PC World reports that Windows will get slimmed down significantly in the new release. It will have much fewer embedded programs and instead give users the option to download only those native apps they desire. Microsoft hopes to eliminate the conflicts and the overload that plague Vista now. It will require users to be on the Internet, but most people already are for significant periods with their computers.
It sounds like Microsoft learned a lesson. So did its users.
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Ooohhh an MS Truther. Start a web site and create a crappy little production. Good luck.
ronsfi on October 28, 2008 at 11:56 AM
Here is a mid-day palate-cleanser that I am posting to all of today’s threads. It’s very inspirational and I promise it will be worth 2 minutes of your life. Birth of the U.S.
ManlyRash on October 28, 2008 at 11:59 AM
BTW Ed, you should probably stick to political commentary. Your foray into blogging about technology lately has been a bust. You clearly don’t have the requisite knowledge and Hot Air is not Slashdot.
echosyst on October 28, 2008 at 12:00 PM
Where did this myth start?
I’ve used lots of different hardware running lots of systems from VAX/DECstations to Evans & Sutherland PS350/PS330 to SGI Octanes to PCs and Macs. (Personally, I kinda miss VMS, but I cut my teeth on that system.) My experiences with PCs in the lab and in an office setting is that they require the intervention of a sys admin much more often than do Macs. In the life sciences, Macs were the dominant platform because they provided high-end graphics at a more affordable price than something like an SGI. When Mac made it seamless to switch from their OS to UNIX, my friends in computer science started to migrate to Macs as well.
I understand PCs are popular. They’re cheaper and there is lots more software available. (There have also been a lot more viruses.)
I say “chacun à son goût,” but my observation has been that the folks who are the most viscerally opposed to Macs are sys admins who want to keep their jobs, people who like to “tinker” but who found they couldn’t get past the black box of the old Mac operating system, and folks who haven’t used or can’t afford a Mac.
As for the “political correctness” of Mac vs PC, personally I find the “I am PC” ad to be waaay to into globalism for my taste. I’d rather not be reminded of the overseas hackers attacking my network, thank you very much.
Y-not on October 28, 2008 at 12:15 PM
I love Vista! No problems at all. It’s beautiful, organized, and the sidebar is really nifty.
On the other hand every time I see an ad for Apple or walk past one of their stores I get this “too cool for you” vibe.
Plus Apple devotees are a little arrogant IMHO. Those latte sipping hipster doofus types with their Apple laptops, iPods and iPhones sitting at Starbucks all look like Obama voters to me. Reason enough to stick with Vista!
Woody on October 28, 2008 at 12:15 PM
Completely OT but…
Thanks! I needed that.
God save our American States!
Amen.
pannw on October 28, 2008 at 12:21 PM
Because of our reliance on third party software we are unable to use Vista…. as it is not certified by many of our vendors. As a result I’ve only used it on a limited basis.
It tries to do too much for you. Just let me configure crap myself dammit!
I really think Vista will be equated with Window Millennium Edition.
roux on October 28, 2008 at 12:32 PM
Bill’em Gates was played when he decided that the answer to the security issue was to strap Vista into a chastity belt and talking up its virtues believing that what the world really was seeking was a saintly PC. He also blew it with the inscrutable new search function which works okay for file name searches but is completely unreliable when doing a “find text in file” search. He brought on the Mac gloat over the bloat himself.
As far as Mac goes, the system is too doctrinaire in its design for me to ever have much use with. Even with the warts of the red pill Vista, it still provides much better value than the blue pill Mac.
So, it seems that even Ed has lost his fervor for this race, what with seeing him invest his time on techie subjects this late in the political season. A sign of resignation?
Sailfish on October 28, 2008 at 12:44 PM
“Plus Apple devotees are a little arrogant IMHO.”
Well, heck yeah!!!
And we have got a lot to be arrogant about. Name any other technology company that has done as much to impact its culture than Apple?
1. Create the Graphic User Interface.
2. Invent the iPod, iTunes and the online music store.
3. Enable podcasting.
Just some of the ways that are normal operations today that were imagineered by Apple techs.
pelajus on October 28, 2008 at 12:58 PM
Time to be a bit nit picky. Zerox invented the GUI, Jobs saw it at I believe a show and tell got all excited about it, started developing his own, brought in Billy Boy Gates to help which eventually brought us to the latest and “greatest” Vista.
Duncan Khuver on October 28, 2008 at 1:06 PM
I stopped with XP. No more OS upgrades, if I can avoid it….not when they come from MS anyway. My laptop came pre-loaded with Vista, and it’s horrible. You know that nice little tool bar on explorer, with ‘file’, ‘edit’, etc on it? It’s gone in Vista. Have fun trying to figure out how to do things! Nothing about it is intuitive…it’s frustrating, to say the least. Worse, it’s pre-crippled at the development stage, runs slow, experiences weird 1/2 second pauses, and apps that run fine under xp bog down to a crawl under Vista, and this on a machine with 50% more ram, and faster dual core processor.
I expect ‘Windows 7′ to include every crappy ‘feature’, that Vista does now, with none of it’s (very few) redeeming qualities.
DngrMse on October 28, 2008 at 1:14 PM
And further to my last sentence, I fully expect MS to field nearly a dozen different versions of ‘Windows 7′. 64 bit, 32 bit, dual core 64 bit, dual core 32 bit. Home versions, small business versions, large business versions, educational versions…and all will come with a price tag that will make Vista seem a bargain.
Blech. Count. Me. Out.
DngrMse on October 28, 2008 at 1:20 PM
Yup. And lets not even go into “restraint of trade” with the Psytar lawsuit, aka Bundling for Dummies. Then again, lets.
Oh, and Bill is just as liberal — his Millenium Scholarships ($1B endowment) are restricted by race first, income second. I can see the income restriction, but not the racial ones.
unclesmrgol on October 28, 2008 at 1:21 PM
what about those of us still using Windows 2000 Professional?
Kaptain Amerika on October 28, 2008 at 1:39 PM
Just bought a new DELL studio laptop with Windows Vista.
I heard about problems with Vista, but figured it was BIOS errors with some laptops…
then..
I started having problems with my sound. It was so bad I couldn’t even play DVDs or MP3s on my laptop. I’d get nasty error messages and the computer would freeze.
So, I called Dell and the tech apologized saying my laptop was supposed to be used with XP, but Microsoft refused to allow XP to be put on newer computers. So, I got Vista. The tech said the BIOS didn’t agree with Vista, so there were problems with my model of Dell.
Naturally, I was p.o.’d.
So, he REMOTE ACCESSED my computer, reinstalled a newer BIOS and apologized profusely.
Funny thing is, that didn’t fix it.
I went into the control panel and found clicked on two checkboxes for the SOUND properties. SPEAKERS/HEADPHONE properties (advanced tab). I had to check off the EXCLUSIVE CONTROL box.
Haven’t had a problem since.
So, I don’t know if it was a BIOS/OS conflict or if Vista gets stupid with controlling sound like AOL seizes control of RAM/Printers/network connections/drivers, etc.
Black Adam on October 28, 2008 at 1:48 PM
My next computer will be a Mac. Period. I’m too professional to have to sweat an OS crapping out on me.
Black Adam on October 28, 2008 at 1:49 PM
Well, if the rap is, “It sucks for everyone,” then yes. If the rap is, “It sucks for lots and lots of people,” then no. It’s a resource hog. It is riddled with bugs/features (e.g., the inability for at least the initial version to sync with Windows Mobile devices the way every prior version of 32-bit Windows could). Old software often doesn’t work properly with it. And they changed everything around for no reason, meaning you had to relearn where everything was. Not to mention the annoying security features, which annul themselves, in that if everything deserves a warning, no warning will be properly headed.
If you buy a new, fast computer and only need to use a few common pieces of software, you won’t find much wrong with Vista. Just like those Mojave guys. If not….
Anyway, XP, released in late 2001, was supposed to come out in 2000; at least that’s what I recall being announced in 1998. I’ll be shocked if the two-year roll-out proceeds according to schedule.
That may be true, but MSNBC is far more liberal and influential than anything Jobs has ever done with his money, not to mention the other ways Microsoft and Gates use money (compared with Jobs).
calbear on October 28, 2008 at 1:56 PM
Apparently those who have not experienced problems with Vista don’t run business apps. A friend of mine has 12 single spaced pages of problems he has encountered with Vista and his business apps. The person is a former Computer Science professor at U of M, so it isn’t the fact that he is a neophyte. Dell even sells there business computers with the option to downgrade to XP (comes that way preloaded for an extra $99.00)and a Vista disk when you are ready to upgrade. The best use of that CD is to use it for a coaster. XP works just fine and didn’t need improving.
flytier on October 28, 2008 at 1:58 PM
Seriously… :-P
I work in IT and I see most flavors of XP and Vista daily. Vista works just fine and most people I’ve deployed it to like it. Their is a learning curve because the interface can be different. All these tech pundits saying its a turd said the same thing about XP when it came out. These are the same people that have been chirping that “open source” would take over the industry for the last 9 years. I would like someone to articulate to me how Vista is a “cheeseburger”.
And this development cycle isn’t new either. Longhorn was in beta testing right around the release of XP SP1.
liquidflorian on October 28, 2008 at 2:10 PM
Huh? I USED an 8510, and I wasn’t working at Xerox either. And there’s this, and this. So we can thank Apple for the trashcan (‘nee the Windows Recycle Bin), but not much else.
Note that Xerox lost (their case was dismissed) on a procedural issue (the statute of limitations had passed). But they had folders, digital paper, icons, the mouse… Steve Jobs bought Xerox stock as a private act — which act gained him access to Xerox PARC. Microsoft’s successful defense of Windows against Apple at suit was predicated on the “We all got this stuff from Xerox” argument. The out of court settlement from that suit restricted Microsoft’s use of Apple iconism for Windows 1 — but left its use open for later versions of Windows. I count this as a major coup on the part of Microsoft — they ceded to Apple control of a product they knew was going to be replaced, and tied Apple’s hands with respect to future lawsuits.
The 900# gorilla of microcomputing would later purchase $150M in Apple shares, thus making Apple (which was on the ropes at the time) an official part of the Borg.
unclesmrgol on October 28, 2008 at 2:22 PM
Ooohhh an MS Truther.
Ummm, there’s much guilt to be laid at MS’s door. Can you say convicted monopolist? and pretty much every “partner” they’ve worked with has found a knife in their back with Bill & Steve’s fingerprints on it?
Partner’s like IBM, Spyglass, and Sendo.
I R A Darth Aggie on October 28, 2008 at 2:47 PM
liquidflorian:
I would like someone to articulate to me how Vista is a “cheeseburger”.
Here you go!
DngrMse on October 28, 2008 at 3:24 PM
Trying that link again.
http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~pgut001/pubs/vista_cost.html
DngrMse on October 28, 2008 at 3:24 PM
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