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The World Famous staff on Chromebook: No deal

scroogled.com

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Re: The World Famous staff on Chromebook: No deal

#71

Post by bunderbunder »

_delirium wrote: post #67
bunderbunder wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a huge difference, though, which is that Apple pulled it off. The "I'm a PC" ads might have been barbed, but they were also funny, and managed to keep it upbeat. Whereas this "Scroogled" campaign just comes across as sullen and petulant. Scalzi's Law: The failure mode of "clever" is "asshole".

That I definitely agree with. Another of Apple's very-negative ads, the famous "1984" anti-IBM ad, is a good example of that. Analogizing your competitor to a dystopian totalitarian regime risks coming across as shrill and over-the-top, but Apple managed to pull it off.

That one's an interesting case, too, though. It didn't really come out and say any of that; it just let the viewer fill in the blanks. Case in point: In 1984 everyone interpreted it as obviously being about IBM. When it was re-issued in 2004, everyone interpreted it as obviously being about Microsoft.

Compare again with "Scroogled", which quite literally consists of little more than a pile of long-winded lecturing. Seriously, sitting through one of those ads transports me back to my sophomore history class. The one where the teacher had no shortage of. . . opinions.

Re: The World Famous staff on Chromebook: No deal

#72

Post by Gustomaximus »

As a marketing person this makes me cringe for my industry, expecially in the tech world where we are not always the most popular department. Microsoft should be able to attract great marketing talent so I don't understand why they keep putting out this quality of advertising.

Clearly the ad budget is there to have options and talented people work on their briefs. Having a dig at competitors is fine now and again. I once did very cheap video that poked fun at Google that went a little viral/popular but it was done in fun, as much mocking ourself, not like this. And I cant believe one marketing team in MS has produced this steady stream of flops over the years. It makes me wonder what environment they have that creates this output.

A year or so ago I considered writing to them looking for work as I feel they are in a great position to stop being the bad guys and let other companies take that mantle. The need to be brave and approach the market in an open honest format. On top of which they often have good tech that doesn't get explained correctly and falls by the wayside. But doing marketing like this, they'd be better doing nothing.

Re: The World Famous staff on Chromebook: No deal

#74

Post by eco »

kenjackson wrote: post #34
zmmmmm wrote: post #17

Has there ever been such a low ball PR campaign by such a large company? It's seriously hard to think of any major company that's come out with such sleazy tactics as this against a direct competitor. Can you ever imagine Google or Apple running direct to consumer ads referring to Microsoft as "Microshaft" or some other slogan? Even on Reddit, things such as "M$" usually result in a torrent of down votes. It's a fasc…

Apple had a whole TV campaign with Justin Long mocking Microsoft. It was pretty successful I recall.

I always remember them as the ads with John Hodgman.

Re: The World Famous staff on Chromebook: No deal

#75

Post by snowwrestler »

Bhel wrote: post #56
amaks wrote: post #9

"The only problem with Microsoft is they just have no taste. They have absolutely no taste. And I don't mean that in a small way, I mean that in a big way, in the sense that they don't think of original ideas, and they don't bring much culture into their products." Steve Jobs

I wouldn't quote Jobs in scenarios like this, given that he pulled a pretty similar thing with the whole Flash thing: a misinformation campaing with the sole purpose of attacking the competition with fallacies and sketchy arguments.

He was right about Flash--Adobe never did get it running well on mobile devices, despite trying very hard to do so on Android.

Re: The World Famous staff on Chromebook: No deal

#76

Post by praxulus »

notacoward wrote: post #55

They just don't Get It. I'm typing this on a Chromebook right now - the 14" HP one. It's cheap, it's light, it's pleasant to use. That's the value prop. Microsoft claims you can get the same with Windows, so the very first thing I did was check the specs and reviews for the models they tout. Are they really that comparable? * Approximately same price, same screen size and resolution, same processor and memory. * Four…

> (and malware)

Has this really been a problem since XP SP2? Maybe I haven't been using my windows machine enough, but I honestly can't remember having any malware issues in quite a few years.

Re: The World Famous staff on Chromebook: No deal

#77

Post by cdh »

rmccue wrote: post #47

One of their "Chromebook Can'ts" is called Document Incompatibility [1]. It's definitely Google's fault that Microsoft uses a proprietary format to lock-out everyone else. [1]: http://www.scroogled.com/chromebook/OSCants

OpenXML is a proprietary format?

That seems like a stretch to me.

Re: The World Famous staff on Chromebook: No deal

#80

Post by eitland »

praxulus wrote: post #76
notacoward wrote: post #55

They just don't Get It. I'm typing this on a Chromebook right now - the 14" HP one. It's cheap, it's light, it's pleasant to use. That's the value prop. Microsoft claims you can get the same with Windows, so the very first thing I did was check the specs and reviews for the models they tout. Are they really that comparable? * Approximately same price, same screen size and resolution, same processor and memory. * Four…

> (and malware) Has this really been a problem since XP SP2? Maybe I haven't been using my windows machine enough, but I honestly can't remember having any malware issues in quite a few years.

Neither have I. But just the other night I visited my friends house and had a look at his kids pc.

(And some windows pcs even come preloaded with mcafee scareware that will be showing pop ups and eventually block your Internet access.)

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