Microsoft's biggest competitor right now is... Microsoft.
Category Microsoft
John Gruber at the Daring Fireball blog has an insightful post about Microsoft's competition struggle. Well worth reading, because I think he nails the point very well...
It is, admittedly, a cliché, but Microsoft is clearly a victim of its own staggering success. What they’ve done best, historically, is kill and/or neuter their competitors. That’s why they’re gearing up for a fight against Google; Microsoft, as a company, defines itself by its rivalries. They relegated early PC peers like WordPerfect, Lotus, and Borland to relative obscurity; then, famously, they outright obliterated Netscape.
In the ’90s, to sell copies of Word, they needed to beat WordPerfect, and they did; to sell Excel, they needed to beat Lotus 1-2-3. Now, though, to sell new copies of Microsoft Office, they need to beat older copies of Microsoft Office. Hence the much-maligned ads in which Microsoft casts their own users as dinosaurs simply because they haven’t upgraded to the latest version of Office.
Most of the criticism of these ads revolves around the fact that it’s a bad idea to insult your own customers. But what I found interesting about them is the tacit acknowledgment that Microsoft’s strongest competitor in today’s office software market isn’t OpenOffice, or any other competing suite from another company, but rather the Microsoft of a decade ago.
And concerning their latest "people_ready" campaign...
This ad epitomizes everything that’s wrong with Microsoft: they have nothing new to offer. There’s nothing wrong with branding ads; I like branding ads (e.g. Nike’s “Just Do It” and Apple’s “Think Different” campaigns). But if this “people_ready” ad is supposed to be about their brand, what is the message? The only message I can suss from it is “Buy Microsoft software just because it’s Microsoft software.” They would be better off running an ad that literally reads “No one ever got fired for buying Microsoft” — at least that would be bold.
I’m sure that when Vista and Office 2007 finally ship, Microsoft will run plenty of ads touting tangible features of these products. But this ad reeks to high hell of “We’ve got lots of money in the ad budget but no new products to advertise, so we’ll buy some ads that say nothing at all.”
This ad is almost offensively timid. And “timid” is not a word normally associated with Microsoft — or any thriving company, for that matter.
John Gruber at the Daring Fireball blog has an insightful post about Microsoft's competition struggle. Well worth reading, because I think he nails the point very well...
It is, admittedly, a cliché, but Microsoft is clearly a victim of its own staggering success. What they’ve done best, historically, is kill and/or neuter their competitors. That’s why they’re gearing up for a fight against Google; Microsoft, as a company, defines itself by its rivalries. They relegated early PC peers like WordPerfect, Lotus, and Borland to relative obscurity; then, famously, they outright obliterated Netscape.
In the ’90s, to sell copies of Word, they needed to beat WordPerfect, and they did; to sell Excel, they needed to beat Lotus 1-2-3. Now, though, to sell new copies of Microsoft Office, they need to beat older copies of Microsoft Office. Hence the much-maligned ads in which Microsoft casts their own users as dinosaurs simply because they haven’t upgraded to the latest version of Office.
Most of the criticism of these ads revolves around the fact that it’s a bad idea to insult your own customers. But what I found interesting about them is the tacit acknowledgment that Microsoft’s strongest competitor in today’s office software market isn’t OpenOffice, or any other competing suite from another company, but rather the Microsoft of a decade ago.
And concerning their latest "people_ready" campaign...
This ad epitomizes everything that’s wrong with Microsoft: they have nothing new to offer. There’s nothing wrong with branding ads; I like branding ads (e.g. Nike’s “Just Do It” and Apple’s “Think Different” campaigns). But if this “people_ready” ad is supposed to be about their brand, what is the message? The only message I can suss from it is “Buy Microsoft software just because it’s Microsoft software.” They would be better off running an ad that literally reads “No one ever got fired for buying Microsoft” — at least that would be bold.
I’m sure that when Vista and Office 2007 finally ship, Microsoft will run plenty of ads touting tangible features of these products. But this ad reeks to high hell of “We’ve got lots of money in the ad budget but no new products to advertise, so we’ll buy some ads that say nothing at all.”
This ad is almost offensively timid. And “timid” is not a word normally associated with Microsoft — or any thriving company, for that matter.
| Permalink |
