Vista has an image problem that has been elevated to popular culture status thanks to Apple’s
Last week, Microsoft fired its advertising company for Vista, The Wall Street Journal reports. Ironically enough, advertising wunderkind, Alex Bogusky, has been working on the new campaign. Bogusky is an iPhone/Mac-kind-of-guy if ever there was one. So using fire to fight fire, or maybe it is better stated as using Mac-heads to fight Apple, is the next strategy.
Microsoft won’t do more than hint that the counterattack is coming and coming soon. But despite PC guy’s image, Microsoft does know its way around a marketing campaign. Granted, Apple’s ability to market itself is the kind of genius that comes from having Steve Jobs as a leader. But pundits are expecting this counterattack campaign to be anything but stodgy full-page ads advertising Vista’s features and its memory requirements.
We might have gotten a hint from this section of Brook’s speech yesterday:
“Now, we’ve got a highly vocal minority out there in Apple. They kind of look at this and say, hey, you know what, you’re kind of boring with the mundane message; it’s not cool. They tell you it’s the “i-way” or the highway.
Well, you know what–we think that’s kind of a sad message. Everyone in this room knows better. We know that software that is made for this world is made to be compatible with your whole life, whether at work or at play, on home or on the go. Free the people: That is what we do, that is what we do every day–that is the value that we create for the world today.”
Free the people? Shall we forget for the moment that if the people are in IT desktop bondage, it must be to Microsoft since it owns that market?
Still, we at Microsoft Subnet are rooting for some great don’t-fast-forward-through-them ads on the part of Microsoft. In this election year, the American public deserves to see the incumbent take on this rising star.
Go to the Microsoft Subnet home page for more news, blogs, podcasts. Microsoft and Google say they want privacy regulation for Internet advertisersMicrosoft pushes “claims based” ID mgt with beta Zermatt toolMicrosoft SaaS pricing for Exchange, SharePoint revealedMicrosoft’s Imagine Cup winners announcedBad for Diane, perhaps good for VMware usersMore Microsoft Subnet blog posts:
