Stephen Ellis | September 09, 2008
IT WILL take more than a quirky TV commercial that ends with Bill Gates waggling his butt at Jerry Seinfeld to restore lustre to Microsoft's Windows brand name.
Jerry Seinfeld stars in an offbeat Windows advertisement that begain airing in the US last week
The offbeat ad started airing in the US last week and is the first in a $US300 million ($363 million) campaign to reinvigorate Windows, which by rights should be one of the strongest brands in technology.
That it isn't, and Microsoft feels the need to hire Seinfeld and run a costly messaging campaign, is a reflection of several factors.
- The widespread lack of enthusiasm for Windows Vista, particularly among corporate IT groups, which regard it as a step backwards from XP and in many cases hope to hang on without upgrading until Microsoft's next-generation operating system arrives.
- Apple's humorous, pithy, ceaseless (and sometimes unfair) attacks on Windows via its successful PC versus Mac marketing campaign.
- Microsoft's own inept muddling of the Windows brand and what it stands for, with its Windows Live push into a range of web services, ranging from security and anti-virus to email and IM.
Beyond these recent obvious negatives for Microsoft's brand equity lie two broader challenges.
Because Microsoft sells only software, it needs to keep the Windows identity front and centre in the marketplace or risk losing its influence over PC makers, particularly as alternatives with comparable functionality and polish such as Ubuntu Linux emerge in the consumer and enterprise desktop spaces.
And Windows as currently positioned has to offer everything to everybody: be forward and backward-compatible over multiple generations of hardware, usable in both homes and workplaces, running on devices ranging from desktops and laptops to servers and phones.
Meeting such a broad range of different needs with what essentially is a single product is a huge technical challenge, and largely explains why it took so long to get Vista out the door.
It also complicates the marketing of Windows. How do you craft a message that speaks both to an individual who wants to run Vista on a home media PC and a corporate buyer looking for a bare-bones OS to deploy on point-of-sale terminals?
Little wonder that Microsoft's messaging and advertising of Vista was confusing, and did little to help what was always going to be a tough sell, given the technical shortcomings and immaturity of the initial release.
Faced with these difficulties Microsoft retreated, and largely allowed Apple (which still has only a sliver of the global market) to define, in negative terms, what Windows stands for.
Now Microsoft is playing catch-up. The Seinfeld campaign has started rather pointlessly, but may yet evolve into an effective narrative about why technology buyers should care about Windows.
And Microsoft is trying other tricks to revitalise its most valuable brand, such as the so-called Mojave experiment, where a group of users with negative perceptions of Vista are wowed by what they are told is a new Microsoft operating system, which of course turns out to be Vista.
But it is hard to avoid the conclusion that the real challenge facing Microsoft is to create excitement around a piece of software that most users take for granted, except when it fails, and to develop more distinct, compelling messages spelling out what it is that Windows offers to consumers, enterprises and software developers (three very different constituencies) respectively.
Your Comments:
6 Comment(s)
The comments below by Jammit (who, of course, just *had* to get in first) show why Microsoft had to make these ads with Jerry Seinfeld.
The ads don't mention Windows or Office. The ads don't mention anything, really. They're just gentle, inoffensive, quirky humour that brings a little smile and a shake of the head (huh? what was that ad about!).
It's Microsoft. You laughed. That's the important part. See that one sad-sack over there who didn't laugh? Why doesn't he get it? He must be seriously wierd. He must be so blindly anti-microsoft that he refusses to even laugh at a Seinfeld skit, even one that *is* off-beat and funny.
Now the link is made. Anti-microsoft bigots are humourless. Jammit (and others), and the venom they spew when they write about Microsoft, are proof of this.
The ad is subtle. It's also very very clever. I make no comment here about Microsoft itself, but the ads are brilliantly made, and the feedback pages of web sites like this one are playing their part.
Jammit (and the other "I hate Microsoft, switch to Linux, the ISO is a conspiracy, fan-boys), you don't realise the contribution you're making.
Geeze to woman bash each other over what brand of fridge they own? I have a Mac that runs OSX and XP and Ubuntu, best of everything. Oh that's right Windows people can't afford the extra for a mac but are quite happy to pay extra for time and virus protection. But in all fairness Leopard (mac OS10.5) wasn't that great either.
You all sound like the typical 'Bash Microsoft' type. No one apart from large corporations have any reason to hate Vista, it's all bandwagon talk.
If your computer doesn't run it smoothly, you must have a pretty terrible system, because it really doesn't take that much.
Jammit. You'll be happy to know that their open source was made a standard. So what? It's open source, so it can be used in any program that wants to use it.
Stop talking about something you clearly know nothing about. Rigging and bullying, care to explain, or did the same person who told you MS is evil tell you that too?
Go and use Ubuntu, it's a great operating system, for the masses who don't know much about Linux OS's, Microsoft is the best option, and I would say, for at least 80% of Linux users, MS is the best anyway
Perhaps Microsoft is now feeling the downside of not having the sort of design control over both hardware and operating system that Apple has maintained over the years.
So called 'IT professionals' have constantly criticised Apple for not allowing 'clone makers' to enter the Macintosh market. But the recent advances of Apple relative to Microsoft are clearly proving Steve Jobs is a lot smarter than he has been given credit for by those 'IT professionals'.
Apple may still have only a small market share for personal computers, but it is basically in control of most aspects of hardware and software design, unlike Microsoft. Hence, Apple is slaughtering Microsoft in other computing devices like the iPhone and iPod which are based on the same tightly integrated hardware/software platform.
It should be really no surprise that consumers and application developers are finally rejecting the laissez-faire Wintel approach and adopting the Apple approach which will continue to do serious damage to Microsoft's brand and market share.
My laptop came with Vista Premium, and I have downgrade it with XP Pro & dual booting it with Linux. Vista -- is garbage.
I have had a real gutful of the Microsoft Corporate Moron impositions, and the perpetual distribution of never endingly bad operating systems and software.
I am also unpleased about the people who manage Microsoft and their rigging and bullying and manipulation in the market place.
Microsoft Anti Trust suits? Go figure. My next upgrade is a step upwards and a step sidewards, into Ubuntu Linux and I am only hanging onto the last vestiges of XP, until it dies because of my windows compatible apps... that is until I can run them all in WINE and or program them to do so myself.
Microsofts antics to get their Office 2007 standard adopted as an ISO standard is a joke in corruption and rotten politicking in a standards organisation.....
Naaaaaaa dirty is as dirty does and Seinfield, he's only doing it for the money.
Post A Comment
We welcome your comments on this story. Comments are submitted for possible publication on the condition that they may be edited. Please provide a screen name and suburb/location - these will be published. We also require a working email address - not for publication, but for verification. Read our publication guidelines.
Share This Article
From here you can use the Social Web links to save Seinfeld can't fix cracks in Windows to a social bookmarking site.
Email To A Friend