Microsoft marketing gone stupid 14
I did something yesterday that I actually haven't done for a couple weeks: check out Microsoft's home page. It's funny... for the past several years I probably didn't go two days without seeing it. Every day I would be browsing MSDN, and sometimes I'd also view the home page. I haven't looked at MSDN for about a month, I guess. I was feeling strange waiting for my browser to bring up the home page, sort of wondering what I've been missing, now that I'm not tied to the mothership anymore.
Any feelings of guilt at having been away so long quickly vanished, when this greeted me:
What in the world is GOING ON over there. This is one of the stupidest ads for a computer product I've seen in quite a while. This is an ad for Microsoft Exchange, so their goal is to convince me that Exchange is a world-class, kick-butt, rock solid product, right?
Is there anything in this ad that makes me think any of those things? Let's see:
- Why do I have to "imagine" a Microsoft product that does what one would expect it to do? Is it unrealistic to think it could really happen?
- Is meeting "my" demands a new concept for Microsoft? Whose demands had this product been trying to meet previously?
- Is this guy supposed to represent the typical Exchange buyer? Or user? Wouldn't it be better to show me that he's getting something accomplished, instead of imagining something with his eyes closed and smiling like a moron?
- What's with the blackboard writing? Did they intend to have it cross out the word "server"?
- Try it free for... 120 days? Why 120 days? Is that supposed to fool me because it sounds longer than "4 months" or "16 weeks"?
I guess what irks me about the Microsoft marketing department lately is they seem to talk down to their customers. I've felt that way as a customer of their development products for a couple of years now, and now I also see it happening with other products too. Imagine all the money they spend producing this kind of crap.
Microsoft: stop marketing your software as if your customers are idiots, and just start building software like you're the best software company in the world - if you can.
Have I missed more evidence of Microsoft's marketing department gone amuck? Leave a comment and link it up.
http://static.zooomr.com/images/612307_17365e9374.jpg
Vista: The "Wow" starts now.
Their marketing department is run by people who don't really use computers like normal people. Hence the disconnect in their marketing messages. I'm not saying you need engineers in that position, but I think they're currently on the other spectrum.
"Microsoft: stop marketing your software as if your customers are idiots"
Most of Microsoft customers areidiots_.
"and just start building software like you're the best software company in the world"
The will be the day.
As a programmer and a network engineer, I only work with software that lets me get my job done. Mac OS, Linux, FreeBSD, basically anything other than MS. I know your thinking Troll, and your probably right. But you know it's true and I'm only responding to the broadcast.
mike: Reminds me of this, which I absolutely love!
the guy looks like he's taking a pee after holding it in for too long.
"aaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhh..."
Microsoft's marketing is no worse than someone saying a programming language is going to make me happy. Really? Ruby is going to make me happy? How happy? A little, a lot? When will it make me happy? Right away, six months from now? What if I'm happy already? Will Ruby make me even happier or maybe even delerious? Do you assume I'm unhappy using Perl, PHP, Python, C, C++, C#, Java, etc? That's a pretty arrogant assumption, isn't it?
I could go on. But I think you get the point. It's easy to take on and belittle almost any type of marketing. MS is an easy target.
@Phill: Actually I do not agree that "most Microsoft customers are idiots", but I am in your corner with everything else.
@Galactus: I'm not trying to pick an "easy target". Ads like this perpetuate the idea that Microsoft products are more fluff than substance. Oh, and in your list of languages, the only guaranteed-unhappy language in there would be Java. :-)
@mike: Totally agree. The marketing people should at least have a clue about what Exchange does, and reflect that in the marketing.
to me, the real WTF is that they're advertising a bloody mail server on the homepage for developers.
@phill: you don't have to "respond to the broadcasts" - try wearing a tinfoil hat to filter them out.
@galactus: strip away the many many layers of bitterness and negativity from that post and you actually make a fair point. cretinous, poke-your-own-eyes-out-at-the-futility-of-it marketing is one thing microsoft don't have a monopoly on.
I agree with Phil...most people that know what they're going for or have complete control over their needs use Linux/FOSS or Mac OS. Whether either platform is truly technically superior, more cost-effective or just sexier for the moment and trendy is argumentative. But what's undisputed is that people who don't know absolutely what they need, what they want or what's the best fit for them are the overwhelming majority in the marketplace.
I've been challenging Microsoft's marketing tactics for years - with the main criticism being that for a company that hires some of the smartest people in the world, they sure use vanilla (and often intellectually insulting) product promotions. "Word" and ".NET" aren't the most creative names for products and platforms, after all.
But I always come back to some of the most enlightening information I'd ever been given, which was handed down to me when I interviewed at MS several years ago. One of the product managers on the Word team told me "If we had our way, we could damn near create the most innovative, revolutionary software program ever written in the history of the world...but at the end of the day we have to bring ourselves back down to earth and remind ourselves that we're only creating an electronic typewriter, and stay within those boundaries."
Yeah I totally agree with you. I'm not sure what the heck their marketers are up to these days. All I gotta say is the Zune and their "Welcome to the social" where they have a bunch of ugly people arguing over music. WTF??! And they wonder why Apple iPods sell a lot more because IMAGE is everything and the last thing I want to see is ugly people fighting over music.
Now onto Vista, come on microsoft can you come up with something original JUST ONCE. Everything that vista says it can do Apple OS X can do and has been doing. Oh and the 11 ways to logout, my question is who designed that? What is so "WOW" about an operating system that has a crap load of bugs? I'll keep my copy of XP and develop on my solid Mac.
And yes I do have to agree with you about why we should "imagine" something working, I think that's about all you can do when it comes to the reliability of Microsoft's products these day. You imagine what your life could be like if your computer didn't have a crap load of security holes, viruses, system crashes cause it can't handle memory correctly, and the list goes on.
Yes I could imagine but then again, why not just go buy something that works right out of the box.
On a final note,....[I pause]....how come the largest software developer can not produce the best product that is secure, functional, and innovative?
i actually quite fancied Vista, until i started to learn about the numerous draconian measures built in to prevent you doing what you want with the stuff you've bought (software, hardware, content). this fundamentally goes against what i've always believed computers to be about, so i don't really want to let it into my home because basically it offends me.
i doubt that OS X's future direction will be all that different from Windows', but for now it's an astounding breath of fresh air after years of using XP. it feels a bit like coming out of an abusive relationship (i hope i'm not being offensively flippant here): it's only when you've left that you realise the crap you were putting up with.
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Separated modes of consciousness, in the broadest Cartesian sense, need to be criticized with regard to their validity and range, before they can be used for the purposes of a radical grounding of the transcendental-phenomenological reduction, by reconciling with noematic descriptions; I set myself the all-embracing task of uncovering multiplicities of the Objective world by a freely actualizable return to the stream of multiplicities of the fundamental form of this universal synthesis.