So it looks like there won’t be any more Bill and Jerry ads. The ad agency says this was the plan all along…which raises a couple of questions: First, was this a good way for Microsoft to spend $10M? Can anybody think of a better way Microsoft could have spent that money? A decent book explaining its PerfMon counters, perhaps? An online reference to which command-line utilities work with Server 2008 and which don’t? A Vista Service Pack that fixes the terrible performance? An Office 2007 Service Pack that does the same? I mean, I’m OK with $10M if it makes me laugh. If it doesn’t, I want something a bit more helpful than the two Bill-and-Jerry duds. (Not that anybody’s asking me, of course!)
Another question that comes up is whether it’s true that “there’s no such thing as bad press.” The Microsoft ads DID have a lot of people talking… but mostly they were talking about how dumb the ads were. My suspicion is that that kind of “buzz” is not what you want.
The latest ad – the one that shows various people claiming that “I’m a PC” – actually has a point, but it has three big flaws in my book. At first glance, you think you’re going to be seeing one of those funny Apple ads with the Mac guy and the PC guy. (I know, some people think they’re unfair and condescending, but I find that they often contain a grain of truth – plus John Hodgman cracks me up.) Then you soon discover that you’ve been suckered into an ad that isn’t funny. You feel a little bit ripped off in that you were expecting a chuckle and didn’t get one. The second flaw is that it shows Microsoft playing defense. “We’re not all nerds!” the company seems to be saying. “I’ve been made into a stereotype, and it’s NOT FAIR!” Nobody likes a whiner. Finally, the fact that Tony Parker and Eva Longoria are “PC people” does not impress me, nor do we need to see that windbag Deepak Chopra again, ever, anywhere. (Besides, even if Eva really does use a PC occasionally, you just know she spends way more time with her iPhone.)
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