Microsoft was widely criticised in the US for its adverts featuring Bill Gates and Jerry Seinfeld. At least, it was criticised on the blogs I read.
But I liked them. They didn't tell me any thing new about Windows, or indeed anything at all. But they were funny and weird and I liked the fact that Microsoft was content to waste millions of advertising dollars on something so off-message. For a fleeting moment, I even warmed to the brand.
But this I'm a PC flim flam has me right back to square one. It's irrelevant and humourless. It is also logically flawed. You can't disprove a stereotype with counterexamples. If there were a billion Ku Klux Klan members in the world, you could probably find six that bake cookies.
That doesn't mean that our general impression of the organisation is necessarily inaccurate. And all these great, salt-of-the-earth types aren't using a PC as any kind of lifestyle choice - they're using one because the PC has overwhelming market dominance and if you don't bother to actually decide, a PC is what you end up with. It's the default.
So I entirely reject the notion that any of the putative coolness (or niceness or wonderfulness or whatever) of the PC-using population reflects on the value of the PC (or, let's be honest, Windows) as a brand.
These are just cool, nice, wonderful people who are stuck with a Windows PC for various complicated reasons beyond their control. Mother Teresa ate quite a lot of nan bread but eating nan bread doesn't make me altruistic.
If - if - Windows is a cool operating system that enriches all our lives, by all means explain to me why. But don't just show me other cool people and expect me to trust you. I'm past that.
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kmatt52
September 28th
4. I bought an HP Laptop at Wal-Mart last April 2009 and after a few months of Microsoft Windows Vista Home Premium 64 bit I will say this, it does not run! At all for very long. Now the HP runs with Linux Ubuntu and it runs, and runs, and I can actually get work done!
So the answer to MS-Windows is Linux,
oh and by the way it is free!
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September 18th
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September 18th
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northerngeek
October 22nd 2008
1. But it's common advertising logic:
Cool person uses Mac = The mac makes them cool.
It doesn't make sense under the microscope but you see it everywhere, MS isn't any different. I too liked the BG and Seinfeld ads, but this advertisement is still fine.
I use MS products all the time, they're reliable, durable and cost effective with solutions spanning all elements of my life, be it health work, University, social, entertainment... it was a choice and a very conscious one. That said I own an iMac and Macbook Air- but that's IN SPITE of the Apple adverts which only tell me that Apple users are arrogant.
I am a PC because I value more than what Apple decides to offer me, I value customisability (that's nothing to do with MS's dominance), cost-effectiveness, and above all I value innovation something MS shows consistently in all the products it puts out- they may be huge but they're still one of the hardest working companies out there and it's easy to see.
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