4 ms·

First hints of Microsoft's $300 mill “fight back” ads appear

26 points by nickb 18y ago

noonespecial 18y ago
FTA: “Vista is now actually better than its reputation. That’s a marketing issue.” Hilarious, sad, and true, all at the same time. Classic.
ks 18y ago
The ironic part of that ad is that Microsoft needs to correct their own "facts" Essentially no one during the the time of Columbus (and even centuries before) believed the world was flat. That's just a myth that people like to believe.
- lbrandy 18y ago
  I think you are being a bit pedantic. First, the statement is true. At one time people did believe the Earth was flat. And it could be argued that the roundness of the earth wasn't conclusively proven until Magellan circumnavigated it.
  - imp 18y ago
    I don't think so. You have to go back a really long time to find when people thought the earth was flat. In the time of the ancient greeks they estimated the circumference of the earth. And even in the heliocentric theory of astronomy they at least assumed the earth was a sphere.
    - mattmaroon 18y ago
      You have to go back a really long time to find when everyone thought the earth was flat, but even though it was no longer consensus, flat earth was still a well-represented belief in the middle ages.
      - boredguy8 18y ago
        I'm interested in knowing those sources to which you refer and also interested in what constitutes "well-represented". The largest and best representation of generally accepted cosmology of the middle ages, Dante's Comedy, _requires_ the earth be round (an 'echo' of the heavenly spheres). And he's basically synthesizing all available knowledge (theological, philosophical, political, and scientific) in his text, so where the text is silent to a conflict (that is, where it's making an _assumption_ as opposed to an _argument_), it ought be trusted as generally accepted. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flat_Earth_mythology http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flat_Earth_mythology has more on the myth. And assuming the truth of the citation in the wiki article, having Gould say, "all major medieval scholars accepted the earth’s roundness as an established fact of cosmology" is, I think, fairly damaging to your position. When one of the biggest critics of religious interactions with science says 'hey, they got it right here', they probably got it right.
        mattmaroon 18y ago
        I meant well-represented in the same way that creationism is today. Not as in believed to be true by most scientists.
  - ks 18y ago
    There have been scientific proof that the Earth is round for at least 2500 years. The ancient greeks even calculated the circumference of the Earth based on the position of the sun. (http://www.mlahanas.de/Greeks/Distances.htm http://www.mlahanas.de/Greeks/Distances.htm). We didn't have to circumnavigate the Earth to prove it. The church also accepted that the Earth was round, despite what many have been told by their teachers. Even sailors knew that the earth was round, since they could see the curvature of Earth from daily observations I found a more detailed article about this on the net: http://www.bede.org.uk/flatearth.htm http://www.bede.org.uk/flatearth.htm I could go on about how the "dark ages" wasn't so "dark", but that would probably be even more off topic :-)
henning 18y ago
It looks like the left hand doesn't know what the right is doing: the site has a conflicting message. One part they have their hat in their hands and they're all humble about the fact that Vista's launch was lousy. Browse around a little bit and you get to http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windows-vista/discover/100-reasons.aspx http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windows-vista/discover/100-..., which says: "Seeing Windows Vista for the first time may leave you searching for words. Many people just say "Wow." Here are 100 reasons why. 1. Windows Vista makes using your PC a breeze..." Am I supposed to actually read through that bullshit?
- mechanical_fish 18y ago
  The problem is that, while apologizing is the right tactical move in the face of angry customers, it's a tactic, not a strategy. A person who apologizes is gracious. A person who does nothing but apologize is gracious but impotent: One may accept them as a friend, but one doesn't hire them. The correct strategic move is to fix the problem, or refund the money, or throw up your hands and declare, believeably, that the problem is unsolveable by anyone. Microsoft doesn't seem to be able to fix the fact that Vista has no compelling features (they're too busy supporting all the non-compelling features that are in Vista... as someone wise wrote here the other week, once you introduce a feature you're stuck supporting it for life). They certainly don't want to offer refunds. And attempts to pretend that it's impossible to build a better OS than Vista break down as soon as the customer walks past an Apple Store -- or, even worse, as soon as she reboots back into XP. So, in the absence of a new strategic direction, most of the marketing machine is still coasting along the path of the old one. They're applying lipstick to the pig. Again.
  - aneesh 18y ago
    > Microsoft doesn't seem to be able to fix the fact that Vista has no compelling features Without getting into specifics, Vista is a much more secure operating system than XP. It also has much better support for detecting and resolving errors. I run Vista (with 2 GB of RAM), and it runs great. I guess in the eyes of most users, security isn't a "compelling feature" because it's not very visible -- but it's a big improvement over XP. Most people who use Vista with capable hardware (yes, I admit this is a weakness of Vista) are happy with it. When it was released, there were lots of compatibilty issues. But today, it's a much better OS than its reputation might suggest.
rit 18y ago
Tie this however with the ads I saw in the NY Subway yesterday, advertising features of Vista and taglined with: "Microsoft Vista - Now with Service Pack 1!" Unfortunately, here's how I see it: - People who are smart enough to know WTF a Service Pack is already are sold one way or another on Vista. Throwing it out there as a selling point is not likely to sway them either way. - Most people have no idea what it is. Microsoft has a huge marketing nightmare on their hands - and now they're backed into a corner because they've forcibly killed off the highly successful XP. It makes me wonder if they shouldn't throw a few more patches in and relaunch the product quietly under a new brand. It's a lot more likely to work than the "Now with Service Pack!" crap.
- kirubakaran 18y ago
  Yes, relaunching XP as 'Windows Minimal' would be great move. Right now, they are their own enemy.
  - rit 18y ago
    I actually meant relaunching Vista with a new brand (I mean, in many cases each release of OS X - esp the last ~2 releases is essentially aservice pack - updated kernel, some UI tweaks and some extra hangon apps and it works great giving it a new name even though it's officially a minor patch level). But, come to think of it - XP would work as well. MS is currently rebranding XP as a 'portable' OS ; they're supplying it to companies making mini laptops like OLPC, Asus [eeepc] and Cloudbooks. I think thats as far as they want to go because they're aware they're cannibalizing Vista business by leaving XP in the market. For me, it just means when I install VMWare on my Macs and Linux boxes that that cracked copy of XP is getting a few more years of use ;)
tx 18y ago
What has changed? I just bought a new laptop with Vista on it. The poor puppy was spending about 10 minutes to boot up and cool down: HDD activity upon startup was so insane that it was better to let it sit for 10 minutes before you could actually do anything. After that it could barely breathe on its own 1GB of RAM, without any applications running. I went through the list of running services but couldn't clean up much: there was nothing excessive. Even usual anti-virus junksoft was absent. The damn thing needs 1GB of RAM only to stay barely alive on its own. How is that usable? These days we're accustomed to running 2-3 copies of virtualized OSes. An operating system in 2008 mustn't assume more than 128MB of RAM available for just sitting and doing nothing, let alone demand 4 times as much. XP was released when 128MB of RAM was more or less the norm. If you had 512MB, XP was screaming. With Vista, these two numbers (for "barely works" and "screaming") are 1GB and 3GB, i.e. Vista effectively increased its predecessor's hardware requirements by more than 400% That's just insane.
- mechanical_fish 18y ago
  These days we're accustomed to running 2-3 copies of virtualized OSes. Well, not Vista, right? I thought you had to own Windows Vista Incredible to have permission to run virtualized copies. Or was it Windows Vista Ultimate Smackdown? I can never remember. Of course, we in the Mac world have a much easier time remembering which versions of the Mac OS can be easily and legally run in virtual machines: None of them.
  - nickb 18y ago
    Of course, we in the Mac world have a much easier time remembering which versions of the Mac OS can be easily and legally run in virtual machines: None of them. Not true. You can run Leopard server virtualized. I haven't tried it but I know people who offer VPS's with it. And yes, it's completely legal. Both Parallels and VMWare support it. http://blogs.vmware.com/vmtn/2008/01/virtual-leopa-1.html http://blogs.vmware.com/vmtn/2008/01/virtual-leopa-1.html
    - mechanical_fish 18y ago
      Oh, good. I apologized too soon -- I forgot about Leopard server. Now I can revert back to my default sense of smug superiority. ;)
nir 18y ago
First the Yahoo deal, now this - seems like Microsoft is just running out of ideas. Macs aren't selling because of Apple's cute ads or clever slogans. They are selling because Windows' much larger desktop software range doesn't make as much difference now that users do most of their stuff online - so customers pick the OS which they judge as easier to use and more stable. On the corporate market, I doubt all the IT managers who refuse to upgrade their company to Vista will change their mind once they see a picture of a ship.
bprater 18y ago
Nobody is talking about the campaign... I have a hard time believing they are going to gain ground by trying to "logic" their way into position. Nobody cares about logic, they work off emotion. I can tell you all night long that the software I just wrote is super-compliant with the OZBOG standard and uses 18.3 jigahertz to mitigate the resonance specification, but you just won't care. But if you see John Mayer and Britney Spears and Steven Spielberg all use Vista and they "love it to bits and pieces" and because you want to be just like them, now I have a tiny wedge I can pound on.
invisible 18y ago
I know Windows is their flagship product, but they need to restructure themselves for the future: the Web. Vista has some neat little visual items that XP didn't, but beyond the visual there's not a whole lot of benefit to upgrading. I mean, most of the boasted visual items can be pulled off inside a browser. From all my experience with Vista, they somehow messed up badly on the networking layers: everything is bogged down under traffic.
petercooper 18y ago
I didn't even get what that ad was supposed to mean until I read the interpretation of it. I'm not sure the general public are really going to hook on to it. Ads have to be catchy and understandable or at least witty.. this has none of those characteristics. It's just confusing.

26 points by nickb 18y ago

FTA: “Vista is now actually better than its reputation. That’s a marketing issue.” Hilarious, sad, and true, all at the same time. Classic.

ks 18y ago

The ironic part of that ad is that Microsoft needs to correct their own "facts" Essentially no one during the the time of Columbus (and even centuries before) believed the world was flat. That's just a myth that people like to believe.

lbrandy 18y ago
I think you are being a bit pedantic. First, the statement is true. At one time people did believe the Earth was flat. And it could be argued that the roundness of the earth wasn't conclusively proven until Magellan circumnavigated it.
- imp 18y ago
  I don't think so. You have to go back a really long time to find when people thought the earth was flat. In the time of the ancient greeks they estimated the circumference of the earth. And even in the heliocentric theory of astronomy they at least assumed the earth was a sphere.
  - mattmaroon 18y ago
    You have to go back a really long time to find when everyone thought the earth was flat, but even though it was no longer consensus, flat earth was still a well-represented belief in the middle ages.
    - boredguy8 18y ago
      I'm interested in knowing those sources to which you refer and also interested in what constitutes "well-represented". The largest and best representation of generally accepted cosmology of the middle ages, Dante's Comedy, _requires_ the earth be round (an 'echo' of the heavenly spheres). And he's basically synthesizing all available knowledge (theological, philosophical, political, and scientific) in his text, so where the text is silent to a conflict (that is, where it's making an _assumption_ as opposed to an _argument_), it ought be trusted as generally accepted. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flat_Earth_mythology http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flat_Earth_mythology has more on the myth. And assuming the truth of the citation in the wiki article, having Gould say, "all major medieval scholars accepted the earth’s roundness as an established fact of cosmology" is, I think, fairly damaging to your position. When one of the biggest critics of religious interactions with science says 'hey, they got it right here', they probably got it right.
      - mattmaroon 18y ago
        I meant well-represented in the same way that creationism is today. Not as in believed to be true by most scientists.
- ks 18y ago
  There have been scientific proof that the Earth is round for at least 2500 years. The ancient greeks even calculated the circumference of the Earth based on the position of the sun. (http://www.mlahanas.de/Greeks/Distances.htm http://www.mlahanas.de/Greeks/Distances.htm). We didn't have to circumnavigate the Earth to prove it. The church also accepted that the Earth was round, despite what many have been told by their teachers. Even sailors knew that the earth was round, since they could see the curvature of Earth from daily observations I found a more detailed article about this on the net: http://www.bede.org.uk/flatearth.htm http://www.bede.org.uk/flatearth.htm I could go on about how the "dark ages" wasn't so "dark", but that would probably be even more off topic :-)

henning 18y ago

It looks like the left hand doesn't know what the right is doing: the site has a conflicting message. One part they have their hat in their hands and they're all humble about the fact that Vista's launch was lousy. Browse around a little bit and you get to http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windows-vista/discover/100-reasons.aspx http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windows-vista/discover/100-..., which says: "Seeing Windows Vista for the first time may leave you searching for words. Many people just say "Wow." Here are 100 reasons why. 1. Windows Vista makes using your PC a breeze..." Am I supposed to actually read through that bullshit?

mechanical_fish 18y ago
The problem is that, while apologizing is the right tactical move in the face of angry customers, it's a tactic, not a strategy. A person who apologizes is gracious. A person who does nothing but apologize is gracious but impotent: One may accept them as a friend, but one doesn't hire them. The correct strategic move is to fix the problem, or refund the money, or throw up your hands and declare, believeably, that the problem is unsolveable by anyone. Microsoft doesn't seem to be able to fix the fact that Vista has no compelling features (they're too busy supporting all the non-compelling features that are in Vista... as someone wise wrote here the other week, once you introduce a feature you're stuck supporting it for life). They certainly don't want to offer refunds. And attempts to pretend that it's impossible to build a better OS than Vista break down as soon as the customer walks past an Apple Store -- or, even worse, as soon as she reboots back into XP. So, in the absence of a new strategic direction, most of the marketing machine is still coasting along the path of the old one. They're applying lipstick to the pig. Again.
- aneesh 18y ago
  > Microsoft doesn't seem to be able to fix the fact that Vista has no compelling features Without getting into specifics, Vista is a much more secure operating system than XP. It also has much better support for detecting and resolving errors. I run Vista (with 2 GB of RAM), and it runs great. I guess in the eyes of most users, security isn't a "compelling feature" because it's not very visible -- but it's a big improvement over XP. Most people who use Vista with capable hardware (yes, I admit this is a weakness of Vista) are happy with it. When it was released, there were lots of compatibilty issues. But today, it's a much better OS than its reputation might suggest.

rit 18y ago

Tie this however with the ads I saw in the NY Subway yesterday, advertising features of Vista and taglined with: "Microsoft Vista - Now with Service Pack 1!" Unfortunately, here's how I see it: - People who are smart enough to know WTF a Service Pack is already are sold one way or another on Vista. Throwing it out there as a selling point is not likely to sway them either way. - Most people have no idea what it is. Microsoft has a huge marketing nightmare on their hands - and now they're backed into a corner because they've forcibly killed off the highly successful XP. It makes me wonder if they shouldn't throw a few more patches in and relaunch the product quietly under a new brand. It's a lot more likely to work than the "Now with Service Pack!" crap.

kirubakaran 18y ago
Yes, relaunching XP as 'Windows Minimal' would be great move. Right now, they are their own enemy.
- rit 18y ago
  I actually meant relaunching Vista with a new brand (I mean, in many cases each release of OS X - esp the last ~2 releases is essentially aservice pack - updated kernel, some UI tweaks and some extra hangon apps and it works great giving it a new name even though it's officially a minor patch level). But, come to think of it - XP would work as well. MS is currently rebranding XP as a 'portable' OS ; they're supplying it to companies making mini laptops like OLPC, Asus [eeepc] and Cloudbooks. I think thats as far as they want to go because they're aware they're cannibalizing Vista business by leaving XP in the market. For me, it just means when I install VMWare on my Macs and Linux boxes that that cracked copy of XP is getting a few more years of use ;)

tx 18y ago

What has changed? I just bought a new laptop with Vista on it. The poor puppy was spending about 10 minutes to boot up and cool down: HDD activity upon startup was so insane that it was better to let it sit for 10 minutes before you could actually do anything. After that it could barely breathe on its own 1GB of RAM, without any applications running. I went through the list of running services but couldn't clean up much: there was nothing excessive. Even usual anti-virus junksoft was absent. The damn thing needs 1GB of RAM only to stay barely alive on its own. How is that usable? These days we're accustomed to running 2-3 copies of virtualized OSes. An operating system in 2008 mustn't assume more than 128MB of RAM available for just sitting and doing nothing, let alone demand 4 times as much. XP was released when 128MB of RAM was more or less the norm. If you had 512MB, XP was screaming. With Vista, these two numbers (for "barely works" and "screaming") are 1GB and 3GB, i.e. Vista effectively increased its predecessor's hardware requirements by more than 400% That's just insane.

mechanical_fish 18y ago
These days we're accustomed to running 2-3 copies of virtualized OSes. Well, not Vista, right? I thought you had to own Windows Vista Incredible to have permission to run virtualized copies. Or was it Windows Vista Ultimate Smackdown? I can never remember. Of course, we in the Mac world have a much easier time remembering which versions of the Mac OS can be easily and legally run in virtual machines: None of them.
- nickb 18y ago
  Of course, we in the Mac world have a much easier time remembering which versions of the Mac OS can be easily and legally run in virtual machines: None of them. Not true. You can run Leopard server virtualized. I haven't tried it but I know people who offer VPS's with it. And yes, it's completely legal. Both Parallels and VMWare support it. http://blogs.vmware.com/vmtn/2008/01/virtual-leopa-1.html http://blogs.vmware.com/vmtn/2008/01/virtual-leopa-1.html
  - mechanical_fish 18y ago
    Oh, good. I apologized too soon -- I forgot about Leopard server. Now I can revert back to my default sense of smug superiority. ;)

nir 18y ago

First the Yahoo deal, now this - seems like Microsoft is just running out of ideas. Macs aren't selling because of Apple's cute ads or clever slogans. They are selling because Windows' much larger desktop software range doesn't make as much difference now that users do most of their stuff online - so customers pick the OS which they judge as easier to use and more stable. On the corporate market, I doubt all the IT managers who refuse to upgrade their company to Vista will change their mind once they see a picture of a ship.

bprater 18y ago

Nobody is talking about the campaign... I have a hard time believing they are going to gain ground by trying to "logic" their way into position. Nobody cares about logic, they work off emotion. I can tell you all night long that the software I just wrote is super-compliant with the OZBOG standard and uses 18.3 jigahertz to mitigate the resonance specification, but you just won't care. But if you see John Mayer and Britney Spears and Steven Spielberg all use Vista and they "love it to bits and pieces" and because you want to be just like them, now I have a tiny wedge I can pound on.

invisible 18y ago

I know Windows is their flagship product, but they need to restructure themselves for the future: the Web. Vista has some neat little visual items that XP didn't, but beyond the visual there's not a whole lot of benefit to upgrading. I mean, most of the boasted visual items can be pulled off inside a browser. From all my experience with Vista, they somehow messed up badly on the networking layers: everything is bogged down under traffic.

petercooper 18y ago

I didn't even get what that ad was supposed to mean until I read the interpretation of it. I'm not sure the general public are really going to hook on to it. Ads have to be catchy and understandable or at least witty.. this has none of those characteristics. It's just confusing.