Microsoft's 'I'm a PC' campaign created with Macs - Page 3

No, it would be like telling the plumber 'I know you normally usually use A1 brand wrenches, but we manufacture XYZ brand wrenches, and it's important to us that you use our wrenches for this job.'

It's kind of like Alpha bricks building their new brick showroom using their competitors bricks. Or Canon photographing their products using Nikon cameras.

If you're going to try and showcase what can be achieved with a particular product, you have to avoid using competing products. DUH!

Anybody who has any advertising agency experience will tell you that the agency will agree to anything in order to secure a big money client like Microsoft. If Microsoft stipulated that the creatives working on their account come to work everyday dressed in frogmen suits, the agency would agree to it unconditionally. Retraining the creatives to work on PCs is small fry compared to some of the hoops they have to jump through in order to secure business.

No, it doesn't matter how you spin this, this is a colossal cock-up for both Microsoft and the advertising agency involved. I wouldn't be surprised if this very example is used in years to come to disprove that 'there's no such thing as bad publicity'.

Expressions Studio, which the company bills as software that "takes your creative possibilities to a new level."

I used my free promotional cd-rom package to shim up the right rear of my desktop G3 that had the little pad missing! If the package was thicker I would have used it to shim the toilet seat.

Which is, once.


iMac is marketed as a consumer machine first and foremost. If you want to do pro work, use a pro machine.


Funny you should mention that. I forget which brand, but supposedly at least one of those two used Hasselblad cameras to make their product shots of their cameras. Yeah, it's a different kind of camera, but still a camera they don't make in house.


If that's what MS wants to do, they would better served by going to an agency that uses the tools they want used. It's better to pick people with experience in the software in question rather than take then and thrust them into a different environment. It's more than just retraining, it takes experience to get proficient, years can be spent learning all the ins and outs of a program. Creative software is a lot more complicated than wrenches or bricks. Wrenches and bricks are almost always brand-interchangeable, not so with software. Each program has a great many subtle differences in the way that they work, and a person has to relearn quite a bit to switch programs. It's unreasonable to expect, for example, a Freehand user to jump into Illustrator on a major product, or a Quark user to jump to Indesign or back, without a period of acclimation.

Your main point is spot on, so I hope you'll forgive me for picking one nit. The difficulty of doing creative work with Microsoft products doesn't really compare with the difficulty of working in a frogman suit. Perhaps a better analogy would be a client demanding that only frogs, rather than humans, do all the creative work.

And likewise, I expect Apple ads using 3D animation to be made on Windows.


Well, you *could* play games on a Mac using BootCamp. But you would have to buy a Mac Pro, kind of expensive...


And that explains why Apple has so little market share on the consummer side.
Many consummers play games.
Many consummers are on a budget. You can buy a $300 PC. It will be crap, but it will be good enough to surf and send emails. You can't buy a $300 Mac. The consummers who can afford a $1000+ iMac are also the ones with jobs that require them to work at home.


I certainly wouldn't want to see Steve Jobs with the market shares of Microsoft, that would be trully scary...


Yes and no. Apple is not such a big threat, because it's really the same kind of company as Microsoft: control freaks, closed source, DRM everywhere. Linux is a more serious threat, because it negates the business model of both Apple and Microsoft.
But Linux is not such a real threat, because it's not meant for the desktop. I work with both Windows and Linux - and I will soon add Mac to the mix. The three platforms do not really compete.
I would not dreams of running my servers on anything but Apache, Oracle and Websphere on Linux (or BSD). I mean, I also have IIS + MS SQL Server + Tomcat servers, and it works, but just not as well. Apple is out of the picture there.
Likewise, I would not play games on anything but a Windows PC. Same with photography as a hobby - Photoshop is Photoshop, don't care if it's on Windows or Mac. Except that to get the equivalent of my custom built PC, I would have to fork the fortune for a Mac Pro.
But I'm considering a MacBookPro for my notebook - the quality is just there. Unless Apple decides to go for the full glossy screen line in the next MacBook release. Besides, you don't have much choice if you want to develop for the iPhone.

As for work, I don't care. Like more and more people in the development industry, I'm now platform agnostic. Java runs everywhere, Eclipse runs everywhere, PHP or Ruby run everywhere. I could switch on a daily basis between Windows, MacOS or Linux and barely notice it...
This is a trend that will also hit the end user as Web Applications and desktop applications built on AIR will increase in market shares... Then, the threat will be mainly for Apple, because the one thing that won't work as webapps or AIR are games. And games and Mac do not mix well, since Steve Jobs doesn't believe in gaming...


We have a few people at work who run MacOS on a PC too...

And once the MacBook Pro are all glossy too, what will you do? Doesn't the "Pro" in them actually stands for "Pro"?
Besides, that's flawed logic. Merely retouching your photographies is not pro works, it's something many amateurs do, and they don't have $2500 to fork into a "pro" computer they have no use for. You don't need a dual Xeon or EEC RAM for photography, you just need an average Core 2 Duo and a decent screen.


I don't see what's weird there, it's perfectly normal.
If you do serious pack shot photography and if you need to print big, you need medium format. If you need very shallow DoF, you need medium format. And if you need absolute control of that DoF, you need a view camera. So, it's natural that studios specialized in pack shots will use these.
However, this is a niche market. It's natural that brands like Canon or Nikon, which are there for the mass market, do not bother with building these.
It would be like being surprised that Apple doesn't use Macs and MacOS for running its corporate Data Warehouse. I certainly hope they don't use they own products for that!


It's even more probable that Microsoft does not even know who did the video. I mean, on some contracts, we are sub-sub-sub contractors. Do you really think the original client actually knows who we are? It's probably the case there. Microsoft hired a company to come up with the idea, that company hired another one to work the idea into a script and that company hired another one to produce it, and that one hired a shop to do the print... Microsoft is probably as much aware of the little company at the end of the chain that you are aware of what company built the buttons of your shirts...

I love nothing more than a good running gag. This might be one of the best.

Ever.

its kinda like that one time when Apple had their iPhone display running on Xp. Or that one time the apple store people used Windows Mobile to ring up and activate the iPhones.

I think the end game for MSFT will be when Apple designs software that will allow the seamless integration with active directory by managing group policy from a mac server. I know Apple could make a better product than what we currently have to use. If this were available I seriously think you would see enormous growth in the business market. As an IT director at a hospital it is much harder due to the amount of software tied to windows. I don't want to bring in a Mac and run windows on it. I want to bring in a Mac and run the apps we need and lock them down with group policy all on Mac OS. Why buy a Mac just to run Windows....

Agreed. That's why I posted what I did. Apple posted about VIRUSES and then got NORTON for BOH, ask ANY APPLE EMPLOYEE and they will, if you know them well, confirm this, plus I have screen shots, which include the infamous TIMBUKTU (so Apple can watch) and only on FIREWALL PROTECTED COMPUTERS as that is where APPLE DIRECTORY IS STORE, and EACH EMPLOYEE has access to what they call "MY PAGE" which is part of HR, which is part of ARW, where you can see everything from PAY RATE to SOCIAL to buying products at 25% off. The other was, LEOPARD, there was a MEMO on the ARW main page where you go for daily news that said DO NOT INSTALL LEOPARD ON BOH machines UNTIL FURTHER NOTICE (this is why I uploaded a APPLE DOCUMENT) which you cannot find floating around the web and not sure how long it will last, but I also have NORTON SCREEN SHOTS and found it IRONIC THAT IS WAS about 9 MONTHS BEFORE LEOPARD was installed, about the same time Pro Tools came out with LEOPARD drivers for HD.

I like both products, but really folks, what gets me is, have you ever seen the ONE TO ONE customer? They don't know the difference between RAM and HARD DRIVE memory/storage and IT USED to be for FINAL CUT, and now it's all about switching (SESSION GUIDES ANYONE)...and iWork, iLife.....its all consumer and the PRO gets the short end of the stick.

 No MATTE for iMAC
 No dedicated GPU for low end
 No T.I. FIREWIRE for MACBOOK or iMAC
 Apple takes what little work you could do in motion on MACBOOK away, from 171% OPEN GL TEST with XBENCH to 71% with X300, and since you could not play games but only run motion, it affected only the CREATIVE which is less that 1% and 22% is from APPLE RETAIL, and these stores (some) bring in 150K per day.


http://concierge-admin.apple.com/Web...s/RRSAdmin.woa

Apple stores still use EASY PAY with WINDOWS MOBILE and ironically, there was a poll done either here or Macrumors that said there is NOTHING EASY ABOUT it and its much slower than a POS machine.

They are PoS handhelds.

This is supposed to be some shocking and embarrassing revelation?! Please. Give me a break. Why is this even news? Find me an ad agency or video production company ANYWHERE in the world that uses PC's. They are ALL Macs.

I don't a single Apple employee of anyone that has ever worked for Apple, as far as I know. I use the best tool that fit my needs. Right now that is OS X, but if a better tool comes along I will not hesitate to use it. My loyalties only lays with what suits my needs best.

The FUD I was referring to is idea that Gates bailed Apple out with a $150M loan. Apple was certainly struggling then, but a $150M would not have made a difference, even if it were a gift and not a loan. They were certainly able to buy NeXT for $400M. The $150M in non-voting shares was a good faith agreement that guaranteed MS Office on Macs for at least the next 5 years and showed the stock holders that other customers that Apple wasn't going anywhere. Calendar Q4 2007 Apple had a reported $45M profit. The situation was considerably more complex that I just listed, but a bail out it was not.

Are there NO agencies that use Vista? If there ARE agencies that use Vista, then common sense would dictate that they be chosen to make an ad of this nature. The irony is there, plain as day. This is funny as hell!

That is a myth, Microsoft never "bailed" out Apple, that investment they made was part of a patent settlement, and Apple would have been fine without it.

Check it out on my YouTube page - http://www.youtube.com/mtrippe

I have the new ad, the original 2 Jerry & Bill ads and an assortment of other videos...

By the way, I use both an iMac & PC and just purchased the iPhone 3G.

No kidding. I'm a diehard mac user, but this story and the vast majority of comments here make it a somewhat embarrassing thing to claim.

Give MS a break... they're clearly having enough problems with their ad campaign.

I picked up this info - just FYI...

Not all of the images on the PressPass site were generated on Macs. The sample print ads, which highlight the campaign's "Life Without Walls" slogan, were produced using the Windows version of Adobe Photoshop, according to their files.

And, as a user on another site said... "I don't know why this is newsworthy. I'm a developer of Windows applications, I use Vista and on our team and we have 3 graphics designers who use Macs for their design work. Windows is still the way to go for mainstream business software but that doesn't mean Mac isn't useful... this isn't a us vs. you battle where 1 party always fails and the other doesn't. Both's OS's have their merits and high points."

You have to agree with that huh?

Or like when the Apple TVs were hooked up to SONY monitors at the Apple stores- like they couldn't get a generic monitor?

Show me any business Fortune 500 Company ANYWHERE that doesn't use Excel and instead uses Numbers 08.

those are not monitors, they are tvs, and nice looking ones to boot. Apple doesnt make tv, they also sell hp printers, cuz they dont make printers either.

Think about this: Apple is a hardware company (self-described) and MS is a software company (if you discount Xbox and Zune). We are talking computers here, right: PC's verses Macs? Apple's ads are mainly aimed at other hardware companies- buy Apple, not Dell. MS's new ads are aimed a hardware company - Apple - that runs Office (MS has a whole BU for Macintosh) and Windows. Now, what's the message from MS then? Don't buy Apple because...what? It's not a PC? MS doesn't make a PC. Are they saying Macs aren't personal computers? If they said, "Buy Vista, not OS X" it would make sense. Someone please explain this to me...

what is the point of this comment?

Quit turning this story into a tangential flame war.

The original story for MS is embarrassing and looks bad because it sends the message that Apples are better (not that its necessarily true, but thats the message it sends).

Also of note: my favourite part about the Ballmer scene where he runs around like a jackass, is how out of breath at the podium he is after 40 seconds of running.

Do you do this for a living? Or is this just a hobby?

I mean this is golden

Mac says it is not a PC everytime they try to dress a hip guy up to call himself a MAC and a geek up to call himself a PC, after all the commercial doesn't say "I am a PC running OSX made by Apple" and "I am a PC running Vista made by DELL" No it is Apple a hardware company competing against Microsoft a Software company.

I'm not sure how you get your conclusion in the last sentence from the previous sentences. Apple is comparing itself to the vast majority of l non-Mac PCs. The Mac even says "I'm a PC, too" in the 'Touché' ad.

This guy, makes a lot of sense. I just wish everyone with there childish MAC is better or PC is better attitudes would think like him. This whole thing kinda reminds me of when I was in junior high and computers were just coming out, everyone was always arguing about Chevy and Ford. Like a hip guy would come out and say I am a Chevy and some loser would come out and say I am a Ford and people would argue about which is better. When they both serve practically the same purpose and both have their strengths and weakness.

That is the only ad I have ever seen that in. Any other ad he refers to himself as a MAC as if a MAC is different than a PC.

Bottom Line is the Commercials are stupid and the whole argument is just like the Special Olympics! And I just wish that a company that has a product as good as the MAC could figure out someway to advertise its product that was more clever than just taking pot shots at Microsoft.

The whole point of the ads are that Macs are different from PCs. Your assessment what that "it is Apple a hardware company competing against Microsoft a Software company." Apple is competing against all non-Mac PC vendors and against other OSes in both look and feel of the HW and SW, so they expressing how "PC"s are bland and ordinary and while Macs are a cut above.

Wow, the news of the century, an ad/creative agency using a Mac, that SO must mean Macs are better at everything!

Guess what?

Apple uses PC's to design Macs! And all the rest of their hardware. All their CAD/CAM work is done on PC's.
Microsoft doesn't need to use Macs to write Windows or produce any of their products. 'Nuff said.

Who's laughing now? Sorry to burst your bubble, zealots.

That sure would make it hard on their developers to produce anything that Microsoft offers at their Mactopia website for Mac, which includes: Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Entourage, Messenger, & Remote Desktop. 'Nuff said.

Here's the story from CNet. It also states that Apple will make IE the default browser on all Macs.

I never understood the logic behind it and to this day still don't. Apple clearly had a strong case(IMHO) and came to this agreement with MS that appears to be more of a win for MS than Apple.

One good thing did come of it we have MS office on the Mac (as poorly as it has alway run it's better than not having it for work documnets).

http://ecoustics-cnet.com.com/MS+to+..._3-202143.html

You have chosen pretty much the worst choice to get any factual, objective news on tech, especially relating to Apple. MS would have developed Office for the Mac anyway, as they profit quite well from its development.

Just to balance the "news" here.....

Apple develops "ALL" their hardware products with design and simulation tools that only run under Windows or Linux operating systems.
(Schematic capture, Simulation, etc...)

Until the point when the "Parallels" software became available to run Windows on the MAC, the hardware development work was all done on PC platforms.

I don't think you will find, even today the necessary hardware development tools on a MAC to go from concept to production without a PC involved.

I don't think this will change anytime soon. \

1) Boot Camp came before Parallels.

2) What proof do you have that Apple has "NO' in-house apps for designing their HW.

Ask your friends if you are truely an "insider" .

Huh? What part of my post indicated that I have inside information about Apple development? I merely asked you to supply some proof that would back up your claims.