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A Decade of Dreadful Microsoft Ads
Barence writes "PC Pro has rounded up the most howlingly awful examples of ads churned out by Microsoft over the past decade. The selection includes the cringe-worthy Gates & Seinfeld ads — where Gates looks like he’s delivering his lines with the help of a cattle prod — to the terrible Windows 7 party ads (an 'F1 key for social inadequates,' according to PC Pro), to the one that got away: an excellent in-house training video produced by The Office's Ricky Gervais."
That was my idea.
I've seen that Windows 1.0 video before, but is that a real commercial? I don't think I have ever seen any authoritative source information included with it. It looks more like a humorous self-parody that was made much later.
On a side note: if it is real, did Balmer ever have hair?
The 7 second ads make me want to puke. The actors talk like they either had way too much coffee or seriously need mental help. If an operating system requires you to be that hyper to use it, then it probably isn't one you should use.
Yes, I know Windows 7 is actually good, but the ads don't really tell us why.
I don't know why everybody hates them.
I'm, personally, tired of the "Bash the other guy" ads.
"I made Windoze 7 better" or "Get a Mac" crap, it doesn't matter.
It's still crap, folks!
I like living in a "Free Market Economy", but come on...
Do we really want to see more of the same old crap?
I'm a huge fan of the Miller High Life 1 second Super Bowl ad.
(1 Second Ad: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZYiGpVGTU2U)
If only we could get those 1 Second ads from the rest of the world's advertisers...
But I digress...
Such is Life...
--Stak
Holy happy hippy crap!
The OS that sells itself!
Instead of whatever lousy marketing agency they are using now, they used John Keister, Pat Cashman, and Vern Fonk to sell Windows, they'd get much better reviews of their commercials.
They were pretty bad too... The commercial with the little kid being brainwashed by Linux fanboys? The Obvious advertisng winners of the 00's were clearly Apple. They got the memorable TV ads and also got the word of mouth thing right. Linux and Micrsoft were the epic failures of the last decade, more so toward the end of the decade.
They missed some hideously-bad ads for Microsoft.
My favorite "bad Microsoft ad" is a 2000 TV ad, which uses the musical theme of "Confutatis Maledictis" from Mozart's Requiem. The screen says "Where do you want to go today?" while the chorus sings "Confutatis maledictis, flammis acribus addictis" ("The damned and accursed are convicted to the flames of Hell").
There's also a 2009 ad featuring a vomiting woman.
- David A. Wheeler (see my Secure Programming HOWTO)
When I play with Windows 7 and the new Office Beta, I see dozens of my pet peeves fixed, and I'll give a lot of credit to those Mac vs. PC ads. The most effective ads for Microsoft -- ever!
--Greg (In some sense of "for" of course) :-)
IANAL, but after the 7min mark, is considered a crime against humanity in most civilized nations.
Care about electronic freedom? Consider donating to the EFF!
Can anyone really deny this was the decade of Microsoft?
Personal
XP released in 2001, is still going strong and will be for quite some time.
7 released in 2009, is going strong and has received great reviews.
Professional
Server 2003 released in 2003, is still going strong and will be for quite some time.
Server 2008 released in 2008, is going strong and has received great reviews.
There was the Vista speed bump but overall this was without a doubt a Microsoft decade.
I'll try anything once. Twice if it tastes good
The scene where Gates is reading Code Complete as a bedtime story to the little girl single handedly made me want to buy the book
my favorite
The second one can be found here
Both are excellent comedy imho.
When you shoot a mime, do you use a silencer?
They forgot to mention this one:
http://campaign.live.jp/bing/
It's in Japanese but if you type something in the text box and press the search button next to it you'll figure out why it's so peculiar.
It's a laughable attempt to get Bing popular, so go ahead and laugh =D
Say what you want but I just about died watching the last one. Funny shit.
Sure, Microsoft has made some terrible ads. And when the get a good one they follow it up with a bad one. The "I'm a PC and I'm 4 and a half" ad was pretty good. The same girl doing the "happy words" ad was terrible.
Lots of people like the Apple "I'm a Mac" ads but I find them to be terrible for a different reason. I think elevating your product relative to your competitor by calling them down directly is mean-spirited and low.
To me those ads make Apple seem slimy. They are what you get when you take an American political attack ad, throw in some whimsy, and add a generous helping of conceited snobbery.
In the early days of Linux (and still somewhat not, though less common) a common thread here on Slashdot was that Microsoft succeeded because of 'marketing'. What about dinosaurs with neckties made you want to buy Office? Or some girl projectile vomiting made you think IE was a good browser?
Microsoft succeeded by knowing that network effects are important, and making sure everyone who could possibly run their software had it, thereby locking them in for the long term. Once they had that dominance, then they could force people to do things illegally. For those that simply say 'monopoly' and do no other analysis, remember in the early days Microsoft was just one of a few companies, and only once network effects started rolling in did they achieve dominance where they could dictate.
Linux did itself no favors by screaming 'marketing' every time there was a comparison against Windows when they could have thought how to get those network effects and push out on the desktop somewhat.
Regarding the current ads of people thinking this feature and that feature was their idea...
What company really wants to have clearly delusional people as their spokesmen?
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
All you people bashing the advertising yet here you are commenting about it after the fact.
/. crowd is pretty much another form of "cattle to the trough" as they say in the biz...
If the main goal was to make the actual advertising stick in your minds I guess it worked, and the marketers are smarter than you think. Even stupid ads seem to keep the interest about the subject. I guess the
I like informative advertising -- here's the products, here's the pricing. Grocery store inserts in the paper are very useful advertising. This also extends to informing people about a product. "Did you know this was available? Now you do and know where to get it if you want it." Direct, honest, acceptable. Persuasive advertising makes me see red, the stuff that's trying to create demand for a product. You're trying to create an emotional response in me, you're trying to use sex, vanity, greed, and jealousy to make me buy your shit? Unacceptable. And when you get some fucking corporate behemoth like an insurance company put out a little heartwarming mini-story and try to link their brand with that emotional response, that blatant kind of manipulation makes me want to start supporting capital punishment.
The funny thing about advertising is that the numbers are so soft. How do you judge the effectiveness of a marketing campaign? How can Coke tell if the billboard down the street is doing anything to keep their brand going? I really wonder that when I see billboards advertising stuff like a CNN show or a local comic with a limited engagement. How can they possibly measure the effectiveness of that ad? At least on the web there's a chance of measuring the clickthroughs though that does nothing to show the people who remembered the url and typed it in directly later. There's really no hard, scientific way to measure this shit. If a product does well, do you credit the quality of the product or the advertising? There's too many variables.
I suppose dog and pony shows can convince idiot IT directors to make expensive decisions. "Let's go with this vendor. They put out a nicer lunch spread than the other one." But is that always effective? I can't think of a Microsoft ad that informed me of anything useful. All the vague, emotional appeals they make could apply just as easily to the current product or the one that came before. There isn't a single Microsoft product I look forward to using, I simply use them because they're what everyone else is using and there's not much choice. It'd be like the fucking water company advertising to get people to drink more water -- haven't got much of a choice there, bub. Exchange 2007? No compelling need to upgrade. We'll do it when we have to, probably when we're ready to upgrade the mail server. There's no compelling need. Server 2008? No need. Windows 7? When we upgrade or desktops. Maybe when XP EOL's but everything works well enough for now. Office 2007? Yay, you get a million rows in Excel but pay for it with ribbons.
I guess that explains Microsoft's advertising problem. If you need their products, you already have them. The only reason to upgrade from XP will be when it's EOL'd with no more security patches and all your new desktops are coming with W7 licenses. 64-bit support and tons of ram? The average worker still doesn't need it. Those who do can run XP 64. When there's no good bullet points to sell on, all you've got left are vague emotional appeals.
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
There's at least one awesome microsoft ad:
Life is short
Brilliant enough to excuse all the others, really.
I can think of only a few commercials that were NOT completely stupid over the last 30 years - especially tech companies. And no I do not care for Apple commercials either....
For years I have been surprised by MS's inability to create a decent ad. Having been to a handful of MS conferences over the years, I have also noted that the warm-up videos are also first rate, so obviously there are people at MS who "get it" and can oversee the commission of decent advertising.
I was recently puzzled by Microsoft's "Laptop Hunter" ads, and really, MS's failure to push what was a really effective ad. They've been smarting for years for from the Mac-PC ads, and they've finally got something that hits the competition similarly below the belt (advertising press reported Apple execs were pissed). MS essentially completes the ad run and then shelves the campaign.
For whatever reason, MS's advertising mentality is just not aggressive and cutthroat.
Who is RTFM and when will he help me with Unix?
You mean Blipverts.
But those things kill people.
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
obvious fanboi is obvious and is modded up by other fanbois.
The new ads with kids saying "I'm a PC" are their best ads in a long time, but those are clearly derivative.
Was the last good Microsoft ad campaign the "Start Me Up" ads when Windows 95 launched?
I'm not much of an Apple fan, but damn they know how to advertise.
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
apps like Google desktop became popular so MS put the functionality in Vista. when the crap that is Google desktop slows down your PC it's OK because it's cool when Google organizes your data.
No, it was OK because I chose to install Google Desktop, or not. Indexing came enabled by default by Vista, I didn't chose to have it so much as I had to go out of the way to not have it. Yes it's simple to disable but the ease of that does not enter in the equation.
What is not, and has not ever, been OK is to have a system default that everyone gets that sucks at some fundamental level.
That's also why the Mac is still better security wise, because all of the defaults (no ports open, require password for all admin actions) and the way they are implemented are reasonable for most people.
same thing with Apple. when people got viruses pirating some Mac software it was their fault since p2p is dangerous. when people do the same thing on Windows it means MS sucks
No, when you pirated ONE app on a Mac you got a TROJAN. If you just plugged some WIndows systems into the internet, you got a VIRUS. And although there are exploits, to date you will not get a VIRUS on a Mac just by browsing, where that is still a real possibility on a PC.
Furthermore, on a Mac if you install a TROJAN all it can really do is mess with your files unless you also give it an admin password. Because Vista UAC was a little too aggressive, they blew some holes in the model and now if you install a TROJAN on Windows7 you may also get some of your system infected too.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Yeah, I know it's /., where picking on MS is par for the course....but still, tech advertising generally is absolutely godawful. It doesn't seem to matter who the company is - MS, Apple, Cisco, Dell, Intel etc etc - their adverts fill me with a rage out of all proportion to that which a 20second TV spot should be capable of.
They're all suffused with a sense of bewildering smugness. The voiceovers always sound as though you're being faintly sneered at. And why do almost all of them have the same sort of whimsical music? Baffling.
Oddly, I've not seen anyone mention the (fairly decent) Office 2010 ad. It was made in movie trailer form, and it didn't come across nearly as forced or cheesy as all the other ads they've produced. When I saw it, I thought they might have finally learned their lesson, but that was before the "Windows 7 launch parties" debacle, so it appears I was wrong there. :-)
For the Office 2010 ad, see: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VUawhjxLS2I&hd=1
And , as an old tag says, there is no disputing taste Seriously - I thought the ads were entertaining and fun; I didn't expect much in the way of info cause MS is a monopoly, and doens't need to sell its products, ON the other hand, i don't expect much of gates; i'm quite happy with windows2000 both OS an office
The laptop hunter ads were the first Microsoft ads that seemed to be on par with Apple's in terms of attack strength, but I don't think they resonated. It made me feel like I was forced to buy Microsoft products because they were a monopoly. It was really a reminder of the lock they have on the market for me.
Apple's ads try to make it "fun" to own a Mac. In my opinion, Microsoft needs to focus on what you can do with Windows. Apple does not do that beyond their iStuff. Push Office. Bring back Windows gaming. Microsoft won't push gaming because it hurts the xbox sales. They really need to understand their different markets. I play completely different games on a PC (or Mac) than I do a console. Microsoft still has the business segment. They need to push that too.
On the other had, I think the Linux community could get the business market if their were a coordinated advertising and development movement. I'd like to see a distro target this market and really go after it. Apple does not seem to have interest in this market. People won't care you can't play world of warcraft on Linux (well without wine anyway) if you can get a presentation done or lookup financials. My boss has been trying ubuntu at work for a few months and he's had few problems. Virtual Box + XP fixed the two apps he couldn't run. Office and SPSS are the only apps that people use aggressively on windows in my office. We're even trying out openoffice on some systems.
MidnightBSD: The BSD for Everyone
Shakes the Clown
http://www.maxineudall.com/2010/02/should-economists-be-sued-for-malpractice.html
This is my personal favorite.
I'm not sure if people realize it, but the device portion is largely taken care of.
Try upgrading to Windows 7 today, and notice that suddenly your printer or web cam no longer work, because there are no drivers, especially since OEMs are pushing x64 bit versions of Windows 7.
Conversely, Linux supports more hardware than any OS on the planet, from small embedded devices, legacy hardware, desktops, servers, tablets, phones, to super-computers.
The 2.6.33-rc1 kernel even has an OSS Nvidia driver built in now. Most Nvidia and ATI hardware should work out of the box without proprietary drivers (not that I'm opposed to proprietary drivers if they truly work better).
I find most hardware just works out of the box with no work in Linux, but I find myself hunting for drivers in Windows all the time. People are stuck in this mindset that Linux hardware support is lacking, but that just isn't the case.
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
Deceitful, Deceitful , Deceitful.
Ducks under chair.
I set it up the first thing that pisses me off is typing in the admin password every time i install something.
And you prefer the way Microsoft does it because you.... like.... applications installed and running without your knowing? Or you are employed by an antivirus provider or something?
the way the Mac fanboys made it seem is that apple magically protected its OS without me having to do anything
UAC is not Unix-like. UAC is a wrapper around the same horrible implementation of Microsoft's security scheme. So, there is still silent escalation among other things not yet understood. Let this moment stand as the first time UAC is compared to a condom that leaks.
So, yes, there is protection. Just like a condom. You have to type in your password to take the condom off. Otherwise, you are free to use the Internets with no fears commonly associated with Microsoft's STD's.
http://www.maxineudall.com/2010/02/should-economists-be-sued-for-malpractice.html
The Apple ads are / were successful in the same way that Republican's rhetoric was successful in the early 00's...they appeal to the idiots and the easily duped. It's very easy to knock down a straw man, and the "I'm a Mac and I'm a PC" ads were clearly a blatant use of the straw-man rhetorical device. Like Carlin said, the majority of people are either idiots or full of 'it.
If Apple's execs were pissed, they were pissed all the way to the bank because Apple had unit sales growth during the laptop hunters run.
Meanwhile, the pc makers showed declines except in the netbook sector. Microsoft's gross revenues take a hit when a netbook is bought as opposed to a laptop. (Not that every netbook sold is a laptop not sold, but Microsoft, in order to fight off the Linux threat in the netbook market, discounted OEM Windows heavily and I wouldn't be surprised if, to break even, Microsoft needed 3 OEM netbook sales to offset an OEM laptop not sold, prior to Win7's release.)
Plus, what was the one common element in all commercials? The glance at and dismissal of the Macs as more expensive. This is not news. Go back and check the Apple/Windows flamewars and you'll note the cost point is conceded and the arguments are whether the differential is overstated and whether the higher cost makes sense because of a higher value. An ad which shows someone making a decision primarily on cost does not really help Microsoft's partners sell their premium high-profit systems. And, in retrospect, it didn't deter enough people from buying a Mac. In a deep recession.
Now I suppose it gave the Windows polemicists plenty of chances to go "neener, neener" as the Apple fanbois and the advertising theoreticians - like me, though I do use and like my Macs - would explain why we thought the ads were not that good, and perhaps that counts as effective. Sure why not? And when did Microsoft have its worst quarter in history?
I continue to find the Windows 7 ads to be stupid. Microsoft bragging about something they should have had in NT4.
My idea was an extension of the function keys to include a 'FU' key. However, now that I think about it Windows 7 is just one big "F U" key.
My office has been taken over by iPod people.
This one should have made it as well...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AFC0XNAGq6M
That was my first take: how could they leave out this classic Microsoft "ad".
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
Meanwhile, the pc makers showed declines except in the netbook sector. Microsoft's gross revenues take a hit when a netbook is bought as opposed to a laptop.
And this is exactly why the Hunter commericals did not help anything and were shelved. Because you had two reactions from customers:
1) I'll shop around like they did on the ads. Look! Cheap netbook!
2) I'll shop around like they did on the ads. This Apple laptop is more expensive, but it sure feels nicer to use...
When you're essentially the default choice, I'm not sure it's healthy to make people think there is a choice. On the other hand you can't really ignore growing threats... a hard marketing problem to solve.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I mean, doesn't a walking penis receiving an eyeball from a farting eyeball creature just make you want to rush out and buy a Zune?
What? It doesn't?
Philistine.
Lawrence Person (lawrencepersonh@gmailh.com (remove all "h"s to mail)
http://www.lawrenceperson.com/
With 90% of the market, Microsoft has never really needed to advertise. Maybe they just wanted to hurt their customers a little bit more?
I was recently puzzled by Microsoft's "Laptop Hunter" ads, and really, MS's failure to push what was a really effective ad.
What? An ad that effectively said, "Our OS is so bad, we'll pay you to buy hardware that has it on it?" Wow, if that is what passes for an effective ad in the minds of MS boosters, I'd hate to see an ineffective one.
That is all.
I'll easily double their ever-bland 20-30ish stock price in a year's time. Their marketing and business teams are lacking the necessary intuition. Apple seems to have pulled themselves together, which leaves Microsoft hemorrhaging customers.
When the Right Guy climbs up, sticks his head above the crowd and yells HERE, NOW, will the onlookers notice in time before he's sucked back into the everyone else's monotony?
The Gates/Seinfeld ads are probably the best ones they've done, imo. How is it hard not to be better than the SongSmith ads, Win 7 party ads, or the homosexually themed walking penis ad? I think even t hose "I'm a PC" ads were a bit dumb.
Seinfeld/Gates wins the MS advertising battle.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GmvxpWjh-4Y
This was a short liveed AJAX, CSS, JSCRIPT and DHTML powered office app that my team was working on 1998-2000.
Yep, the vision and the tech was right. The core IE 5.0 engine was not stable enough for html editing in 1999 - this is what killed this product but it was still a pioneering effort.
And you prefer the way Microsoft does it because you.... like.... applications installed and running without your knowing? Or you are employed by an antivirus provider or something?
Did you miss the part where he had UAC turned-on in Windows?
He's complaining that at least UAC is a simple "yes/no" permission grant, where Apple's mechanism requires you type your password. (At least that's how I read it.)
UAC is not Unix-like.
Yeah; for one thing it can automatically determine when a app needs elevation instead of Unix-like method of the app shitting all over itself, then you know to re-run it with elevation only after it fails. From my perspective, UAC is better than Unix-like implementations.
UAC is a wrapper around the same horrible implementation of Microsoft's security scheme.
How is it horrible? You can assign much finer-grained security permissions to many more objects than in Unix-like OSes. So, again, from my perspective, Microsoft's security scheme is significantly better than Unix-like implementations.
So, there is still silent escalation among other things not yet understood.
If you don't understand it, maybe you should figure it out instead of just implying that *everybody* is as ignorant as you.
There is no silent escalation-- you have to prove claims like that, you can't just write your train-of-thought directly to the screen.
So, yes, there is protection. Just like a condom. You have to type in your password to take the condom off.
If you like typing a password, you can easily set UAC to require one also. In which case, there's absolutely *no* difference whatsoever between Apple and Microsoft's implementation-- oh, except to raving fanboys like you, the Apple one is "good" and the Microsoft one is "bad".
Comment of the year
Wow, the Apple fanbois are in full force today!!!
Yeah, I'm a Microsoft fanboy-- I have three systems running MacOSX-- a G4 PowerPC tower, a Mac Mini, and a hacked Dell Mini 10v running Snow Leopard.
But I also have 2 Windows PCs and a Linux box. Seriously, some of you Apple nuts need to lighten up.
And all this flamage because I said, "actually, MS has had one decent ad campaign in 10 years." If that's a booster, I don't know what to say to you.
The actual, obvious message of the ad campaign was not "our OS sucks" and no rational person would see it that way. What they'd see is that there's a gazillion PC laptops for under a grand.
The ad campaign also got an effective dig at one of Apple's advertising weaknesses, an appearance to come off more than a little smug.
You can rationalize all you want, but that's a reasonably effective ad.
And if you google "apple execs laptop hunter," you'll see a ton of angst from Apple execs and Apple fanbois alike.
Hell yeah I'd call that effective.
Who is RTFM and when will he help me with Unix?
MS essentially completes the ad run and then shelves the campaign.
It's hard to say when a campaign is actually successful. They might be ads that people like but if they're not ads that get people to buy the product, then they're failures. Remember the Taco Bell Chihuaha? That was one of the most memorable campaigns in history, but Taco Bell was losing sales during the course of that campaign so it was pulled.
Don't trust a bull's horn, a doberman's tooth, a runaway horse or me.
I don't, I run as user, reserving the admin account for administering the computer. It's safer, and I can do this because OS X runs all software just fine as user (unlike Windows for many years).
So, yeah, I get the password request for every software install. In fact, that's the whole point of running as a user.
Build a man a fire, he's warm for one night. Set him on fire, and he's warm for the rest of his life.
I've used Macs since I had a Mac Classic on my desk in college, and MS operating systems since DOS, and I think OS X Leopard is the best OS I've ever used. To me, features like column view, Quick Look, and Expose are much more powerful and useful than one-window-per-folder fields of icons--I don't miss the strictly spatial paradigm. Finder as browser more closely matches how I think about interacting with a computer now.
Build a man a fire, he's warm for one night. Set him on fire, and he's warm for the rest of his life.
Except in Nebraska!
If you believe in privacy, and believe you have "nothing to hide" at the same time, you're a goddammed idiot
Every now and then we can say 'that is the stupidest thing I have ever seen." But the Windows 7 launch party is without a doubt the stupidest I have ever and probably will ever see.