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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."
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.
Have you stopped for, say, one second to consider how obnoxious television would be if every ad were just one second long? Some ad breaks are pushing 10 minutes now. That's 600 ads. And it would be an arms race to see who can make their ad annoying enough in that one second for you to remember it from among the other 599. It's a good idea for one advertiser to do, but a terrible idea for more than that.
Also, advertising by its nature is going to be about what makes your product either unique or better than competing products. You can't tell people what makes your product unique or better unless you contrast it with other products. Even if you don't mention the other product, the contrast is implicit. For instance, "Macs hardly ever crash and require virtually no configuration by the user" doesn't have any meaning without context, and the assumed context is that the listener has used Windows and had a blue screen or two and got lost in configuration screens. I'm sure you'd complain about implicit comparison ads like that, just as you do about the explicit comparisons.
It's not about bashing the other guy. It's about communicating to your audience what it is that makes your product their best choice in a way that they will remember. The "I'm a Mac / and I'm a PC" ads are effective at that. The Gates/Seinfeld ads are good for the latter but I don't think they communicated anything about the product. Microsoft could have learned from the dot-com era Superbowl ads to have avoided that mistake.
It's possible to find an ad that is effective without making any explicit or implicit comparisons to other products. The "Make 7-Up Yours" ads did that just fine, as do many food ads because the market is swamped with different products and you can't say yours is better than each of the others and state reasons for that conclusion, but you can remind people of your product enough to make their mouth water for a taste. But, for products where there is a limited number of competitors and you have objective reasons to say why yours is better than any of theirs, a comparison comes up in every effective ad.
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.
As long as Linux can't run the majority of the required software and devices it won't matter how good or bad its marketing is.
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
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".
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