by Jared Goralnick
I must confess to be quite enamored with the latest round of Mac advertisements, even though they poke fun at PCs. The ads keep things simple and hone in on some very specific ideas. As Niall Kennedy explains:
The messages are simple and conversational with just one or two competitive points each. Less viruses, less restarting, better applications built-in for editing photos and websites, as easy as your iPod, simple connectivity, and a really good value are the themes communicated throughout.
Niall Kennedy has recently joined Microsoft’s Windows Live team. I spend most of my day consulting and developing solutions around Microsoft products. But there’s something about the simplicity of the Mac, or at least their advertising, that it’s hard not to love. Many of you probably saw this video (supposedly created by Microsoft) describing what would happen if Microsoft designed the iPod’s packaging, and it’s in many ways dead-on–Microsoft, as evidenced in their failed Origami campaign, just doesn’t have the innovative branding & marketing that they should.
I think that Microsoft and the PC community have a leg to stand on, and look forward to the day when their advertising and PR rivals Apple’s. If you look at the media right now, all the buzz is against Microsoft (what’s going on with the ultramobile PCs, the delays in Vista, the latest Internet Explorer vulnerabilities), but Microsoft has things that could theoretically turn that around:
- Xbox has a huge advantage over PS3, especially in light of Sony’s further delays on bringing it to market. (Sony trumps Microsoft with having even worse media attention in this past year. Did someone say, “root kit”?)
- Windows Live gives the latest Google and Yahoo offerings a run for their money
- Firefox and OS X are not necessarily as secure as we’d all like to make them out to be
- Office 2007′s new interface could be a big hit, which with the right marketing could do a great job to overturn the web Office suites’ buzz
- Vista, with any luck, will have multimedia capabilities that rival Macs. (However, things aren’t looking good just yet)
- Vista’s new file system, whenever it comes out, will take the tagging phenomenon to new levels
- Microsoft’s line of collaboration software (SharePoint Portal Server, Exchange) from Microsoft still has a huge edge in features & extensibility over other collaboration environments
I could go on with this list, but the trend I see is that Microsoft’s two advantages are with regard to:
- The underdogs are no longer underdogs, and won’t be immune to attacks much longer
- Microsoft tends to offer more features in their products. But that may change in the newest releases of Office/Windows
Right now the trend is toward simplicity over extra-features…but maybe Microsoft can show that it has just-the-right features and that they are readily accessible. They have enough products in the pipeline that now’s the time.
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