Tuesday, July 8, 2008
“Vista” Means Always Having to Say You’re Sorry
You can’t put frosting on manure, although Microsoft seems intent on doing just that with its new Vista ad campaign. During a keynote address at Microsoft’s annual Worldwide Partner Conference, Brad Brooks, Microsoft’s vice president of Windows Vista consumer marketing, admitted that Vista hasn’t met with the success for which the company had hoped, and he acknowledged that it was partially to blame for that. “We broke a lot of things. We know that, and we know it caused you a lot of pain. It got customers thinking, hey, is Windows Vista a generation we want to get invested in,” Brooks said.
Apparently, Windows Vista isan operating system consumers should invest in–at least according to Microsoft, which apparently views the OS’s failure as one of marketing and not technology. But there are those who disagree, particularly one snarky competitor who’s been mercilessly taunting Microsoft (MSFT) in a high-profile ad campaign for quite some time now. And so to silence them, or perhaps groan loud enough to drown them out, Microsoft is launching a $300 million ad campaign to explain why Vista doesn’t stink to the many folks convinced that it does. “We’ve got a pretty noisy competitor out there,” Brooks said referring to Apple (AAPL) and its biting “I’m a Mac … you’re a dork” commercials. “You know it. I know it. It’s caused some impact. We’re going to start countering it. They tell us it’s the iWay or the highway. We think that’s a sad message.”
Not nearly as sad as proposing to fix technology problems with advertising.
[Image Credit: Worth1000]
