If your competitor bashes you in their ads and they have a valid point, there is nothing you can really do to fight back. But, if your competitor's ads are base

If your competitor bashes you in their ads and they have a valid point, there is nothing you can really do to fight back. But, if your competitor's ads are based on unfounded or misleading claims, you can get big points if you respond in a clever manner. That is exactly what is going on here. Apple's underlying message is that cool people use macs and boring people use PCs. Well, it isn't hard to find a bunch of cool people that use PCs to refute that claim. The hard part is packaging them up, and I think Microsoft did a good job with that here. The other thing is that Microsoft can kill the PC vs. Mac commercials simply by drowning them out. The Bill+Jerry ads were a few minutes after the PC vs. Mac ads during the same show on ABC (or NBC, I forget). If they do the same thing, where stations run 1 PC vs. Mac commercial followed by two "I'm a PC" commercials, they will deflate the PC vs. Mac message, and actually kind of turn it around to Microsoft's favor. Plus, as people get tired of "I'm a PC" they will get tired of PC vs. Mac too because there is such an obvious association there. Even if people have the "I'm a PC" ads, they still serve a valuable purpose. As for the specific claims that the PC vs. Mac commercials make, I'm not sure it makes sense for Microsoft to counter all of them. But, some of them definitely could be countered. For example, the "it just works" ad is easy to counter. Just fine some hardware that has drivers for Windows and doesn't have drivers for a Mac. Then, have a commercial where you have 10 people with 10 different brands of computers. Have the first 9 plug the device into PCs and say "It works!" Then, have the 10th plug the device into a mac and (insert clever imagery here). This is not hard to do, because in reality more stuff "just works" with PCs than it does with Macs.