g r o t t o 1 1

Peeve Farm
Breeding peeves for show, not just to keep as pets
Brian Tiemann
Silicon ValleyNew York-based purveyor of a confusing mixture of Apple punditry, political bile, and sports car rentals.

btman at grotto11 dot com

Read These Too:

InstaPundit
Steven Den Beste
James Lileks
Little Green Footballs
As the Apple Turns
Entropicana
Cold Fury
Capitalist Lion
Red Letter Day
Eric S. Raymond
Tal G in Jerusalem
Aziz Poonawalla
Corsair the Rational Pirate
.clue
Ravishing Light
Rosenblog
Cartago Delenda Est



Cars without compromise.



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Tuesday, September 8, 2009
06:22 - Seems like you're paying a lot for the brand
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/30/business/media/30ad.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1&sq=pc&s

(top)
NYT story on the recent evolution of the Mac ads and their Microsoft equivalents:

“You are not so embarrassed to take your PC out of the bag on a plane anymore,” said Mr. Reilly at the ad agency. “It’s actually kind of cool that you do. I know this is working.”

. . .

And yet Apple keeps responding. On Friday, it released its Snow Leopard operating system a month ahead of schedule, accompanied by a new round of “Get a Mac” ads. One involves a red-headed woman who is clearly intended to resemble Microsoft’s Lauren. PC introduces her to his suave friend, a top-of-the-line model played by Patrick Warburton, who was David Puddy on “Seinfeld.” She declines to buy a Windows machine when they can’t promise that she won’t have virus woes.

Microsoft, however, has found it enjoys mixing it up with Apple on the airwaves. In July, Mr. Ballmer told analysts that Crispin’s work had been “quite effective.” He promised that Microsoft would continue investing heavily in Windows marketing. “We didn’t do that three, four, five, six years ago,” he added.

For Mr. Siler, this is a welcome change. “I’ve never seen more pride at Microsoft,” he says. “You walk through the campus, and you see people’s laptops that have ‘I’m a PC’ stickers on them. I walk in the company store, and there are these huge banners that say, ‘I’m a PC’ and shirts and ties and mugs. I think I made a difference. My God, that’s so cool!”

Using a PC may or may not be "cool" now in the same way that using scavenged secondhand furniture or growing your own organic vegetables in a window box is cool. Yet I seem to recall reading that items perceived as luxurious didn't exactly go out of fashion during the Depression; they just became sought-after in different ways, treated as a different kind of aspiration. People still wanted Duesenbergs and diamonds; they just had to settle for seeing them on movie stars. It wasn't until WWII that thrift and Victory Gardens became virtuous.

"Lauren" is now appearing in HP ads, showing that the PC makers are doing their best to capitalize on what appears to be the momentum Microsoft has finally achieved. More power to 'em. They're traditionally heavy on the star power, that's for sure, what with a tradition of tapping people like Seinfeld and Tony Hawk to do their spots, and people like Whoopi Goldberg and Jesse James now similarly shilling for Google phones. It seems to be what's in these companies' DNA. And to the extent that it works, well, they'll probably see commensurate uptake.

It's funny, though, to read that Steve Ballmer, of all people, doesn't "get" marketing.

There were also cultural issues at Microsoft when it came to advertising. On Madison Avenue, they say that the more hands that touch an advertisement, the worse it becomes. Microsoft felt differently. “They thought the more people saw it and gave an opinion, the better it would be,” Mr. Musser said. “That’s how you develop software. It’s not how you develop great creative.”

If Microsoft's going to make any significant inroads against Apple's mindshare here, it'll be by playing up half-truths that force Mac people to cry out in indignity, the way PC people have been doing in response to the Apple ads' half-truths. Seems like you're paying a lot for the brand, one of the Laptop Hunters ads mumbles, seeding a misconception—aimed at the clueless—that the only way a Mac differs from a PC is the logo. Not like it's a whole different operating system or anything. Not like the whole computer from bottom to top is engineered according to a different model of all-inclusive computing than a PC is. It's an insidious little offhand statement, one that gets under the skin. It's so well aimed that I can't imagine it's accidental, which it likely would have been if Ballmer had been behind these ads (based on some of his recent statements about the iPhone and Mac, it seems like Ballmer genuinely believes there's nothing different about Apple products other than an overpriced brand).

It's barbs like that that will make the difference. The longer Apple harps on system crashes and BSODs, the more they'll be asking for it, and the more dirty pool we can expect Microsoft's ad agency to play. "You pay extra and you only get one mouse button," they'll sneer. "They don't even give you a choice of colors anymore." "Who wants a computer you can't play games on?"

(The Mac world had better be giving thanks daily for the Intel switch. Otherwise right now we'd be enduring a veritable maelstrom of speed-discrepancy-ridiculing PR, and with nothing to fend it off.)

It's a dangerous game they've been playing ever since blithely exploiting Ellen Feiss' self-admittedly apocryphal story of PC-borne homework death. Now the game's going to get dirty, and Apple had better be ready to dig in their ground. (Especially if, as it appears, there's a groundswell of animosity from the geek community to contend with at the same time.) If they're as smart as they've seemed, riding this wave for as long as they can get away with it, they'll do what it takes to keep a few moves ahead once again.

Via BrianD.


UPDATE: Mike Wilson in comments:

The notion of "enhanced usability" of one over the other never came up. I don't think the civilians really care about the OS. It either works or not. They can either get their functional apps or not. It comes down to performance and price. The aesthetic need can be served on either side of the line with cute vaios and such.

That's interesting to contemplate. The computer-literate population is by now the dominant demographic, and even the non-tech-savvy know the basics. What exactly do they experience when they switch from Windows to a Mac, or vice versa, never having used one or the other before? How long does it take to discover how to move around the filesystem, which apps do what, what the native gestures and icon placements and application launch behaviors are? The NYT story mentions a pre-Lauren Microsoft ad that suggests a 4-year-old can pick up the Windows world at a touch. Have we reached a level of general literacy that such an experience is true of a switch in either direction?

Is picking up a new laptop with a new OS the same kind of experience, to most users, as buying a new DVD player with a different set of controls, but ultimately the same basic vocabulary on the remote? Confusing, to be sure, but nothing you should have to buy a book to figure out, let alone let it factor into your purchasing decision any more than you'd buy a Philips DVD player just because that's who made your TV?


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© Brian Tiemann