So Microsoft is still promoting their new, dreadfully boring software with videos like this one:
Quite rightly, John Gruber says, "What is wrong with this company? Who authorizes this crap?" in a post titled "Microsoft Should Never Make Another Video Ever Again". But you know, there's something just so endearingly unchanging about Microsoft, isn't there? It's like, at the very least we can always trust them to do stuff like this, no matter how many layers of unwitting cliché they bury themselves in in the process. I mean, surely we all remember this:
—Which was surely just as much of a tone-deaf, un-self-aware joke at the time. For all I can tell, the same guy who came up with that thing in the 80s is the one who greenlit the PDC 2008 one.
Granted, the new video does attempt to put a tongue-in-cheek turn on itself at the very end, by presenting the video as some kind of out-of-touch stunt by the clueless new guy on the team. But seriously... even the framing skit is hopelessly phoned-in and insincere, to a degree that the deflation of the ridiculous video itself is incomplete, and we're still left facing the absurdity of lyrics like "You can't win with another system made for losers!"
Maybe it's just not possible to create a video for the kind of software that Microsoft develops, and make it appealing and genuine-feeling. Maybe Apple's long string of PR hits are solely a result of their consumer focus, which frees them up to employ tactics otherwise unavailable to a vendor like Microsoft.
...Then again—honestly. A company with the resources of Microsoft that's willing to dump millions on a two-spot weirdo experimental Seinfeld campaign that it drops like a hot potato the instant it gets less than stellar ratings can't hire someone to produce a decent video? It's not like Chiat-Day is on an exclusive contract or something, right?
Brian Tiemann
