Poor Lauren, Poorer Microsoft
Picture the following commercial. Lauren is given $30,000 and a challenge: “If you can buy a car with this amount of money, you get to keep it.” Her first stop is an Audi dealership, because she’s always wanted one, and has heard nothing but great things about them. She leaves upset, “I could only afford the smallest one. I guess I’m not cool enough to drive an Audi.”
She finds her silver medal on the GM lot. Sure, it’s not as elegant and well-designed as the Audi, but it’s the right size and more importantly, in her price range. So if the message were “buy what you can afford” or “inferior products are cheaper than superior products” you might get up thinking the ad made sense. But in fact, the commercial reaches a very different conclusion:
“GM. Better than Audi.”
This would be about as convincing as Microsoft’s new commercial:
I like my ad better. Let’s see what was left on the editing room floor:
After she buys the car, she can’t drive it until she goes through a long and painful setup procedure. It’s stockpiled with third-party add-ons she never wanted and has to remove one by one. The vehicle is frequently recalled. Often these are in the form of an interruption while she’s at work: “YOUR VEHICLE REQUIRES AN URGENT SECURITY UPDATE.” Depression and anxiety mount. Her hands start shaking as she discovers the whiskey bottle her children had long since hidden from her, the shards of which surround her corpse when the body is found the next day. The police pry open her rigor-mortized hand to find a note. One line, written in blood:
I’m a PC.
Poor Lauren.
Anyway, I left this out because it would make my analogy too convoluted, but Microsoft DOESN’T EVEN BUILD THE FUCKING PC, SO THE COMMERCIAL IS TOTALLY INVALID UNLESS IT’S AN AD FOR HP. If Microsoft wants to get into a logically consistent price comparison with Apple, it should be on the grounds of its OS. But don’t worry, I’ve already done it for them:
vs.
Oops. Looks like I’d have to pay three times as much to buy the only version of Vista that managed to satisfy 12% of its users. Where do I sign up?
This isn’t an anomaly, just look at the other recent commercials:
- The I’m a PC ads. You remember, the ones that were made on a Mac.
- Then there’s the one where Microsoft has to trick people into using their product.
- And let’s not forget The Three Hundred Million Dollar Afterbirth.
It’s painful to watch a company with so much money and talent caricaturize themselves. Microsoft knows they need a revolution, but for some reason believe it’s going to come from their ad department. The money that was spent on Seinfeld cracking dumb jokes about shoes and cake should’ve been given to the nerds instead. They need only to look at their own history to see why.
{ 6 comments… read them below or add one }
Preach it, Reverend!
Thank you for tearing apart this retarded commercial. I’m glad our hatred for their advertising is one and the same.
I rely on broken analogies, blogger vitriol and insane brand-loyalty rather than objective benchmarking and price point comparisons to make my purchasing decisions…
BTW, the functional difference between a PC and a Mac IS the OS. And since you can boot either OS from nearly any computer, the whole Mac/PC debate should not even be a debate: For a PC, you can surf around and find good information about what you need for the work you’re doing, then pick the hardware that’s right for you. This can be frustrating and time consuming, but will lead to a lower cost product of comparable/superior performance to a Mac.
If this is not your cup of tea, just buy a Mac. You will spend more but you will not have to think about what’s inside, because they already decided for you and they do a pretty good job. Plus you get a light-up apple on the back of your screen to signal your in-group membership.
As usual, the winner is the person who avoided the whole asinine argument in the first place and just bought the computer they needed.
My PC boots to MacOS, Windows, and Linux (Ubuntu this month). I have an AMD processor at 2/8ghz per core.
And I paid less then 1/3 the price of a Mac that can perform identically (because it’s identical hardware). I don’t care that MacOS costs half what Windows does… I more then made it up the difference by not wasting my money on a brand name. When you buy a Mac, you are literally paying for the name. Nothing more. Macs are just PCs now.
… 2.8 ghz per core. correcting my above statement. And it benchmarks.. on MacOS.. as slightly more then twice as fast as an identically priced “Genuine Intel Mac” processor. Your example is laughable. It would only be this way if Audi were charging her $30k for the very smallest, but Ford offered them a car that was identical in absolutely every way, except for the name on the label, at a third the price.
You are a marketing drone, you have no mind of your own.
I hear Windows 7 is much nicer.
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