Microsoft's ads doing damage to Apple: study - Page 3

You are kidding, right?

Um, who cares what the 35-49 segment thinks? I'm in that range, and I certainly don't drive the market. Let them have their crappy machines. They should know better. Let's see what the kids think.

M$ can post all the ads they want. They may damage to some extent Apple's sales and vice versa. The main thing is that M$ is now forced to act. This alone is proof positive that Apple was getting into their pockets. M$ didn't just decide to place adds. Snow Leopard will win converts to Apple but M$ will see hardly any going the other way. Apple users tend to be more loyal than M$ users, so these ads basically show that if the price is right, people will jump to Apple. Also, the people in these ads are not the sharpest tools in the shed.

yea, who really cares about hte segment that has lots of disposable income, lets see what kids with no job think about the matter.

Do you have any concept for how businesses work?

Apple do not need to drop the prices they charge.
It is all about supply and demand and profit per device.

They are very happy with the high quality, low units, high profit market they are in.
They sell computers at a price that people are willing to pay, no more no less.
They have a target for sales, if they reach that target at the price they are charging then they are happy.

Reducing prices may not sell more devices, but would seriously damage thier profit.

Apple are a 'premium' brand who charge 'premium' prices.
It is just the same as BMW and Mercedes. Both COULD make and sell cheaper cars, but they CHOOSE not to as it is not a market they want to be in.

Apple have decided NOT to be in the cheap end of the market. If that is not for you then buy your computer from a manufacturer that is in that market. Simple.

Apple make approx 30% margin on thier sales, if they want to keep that margin and still produce the quality product (i.e. the costs of manufacture, etc remain the same) then they cannot drop the price. The only way to reduce the price is to compromise on design, build, quality, spec, software, etc OR accept a lower profit margin (which the shareholders will not accept.

All this is called business!

wheres the user experience that once you go mac, you don't go back?

wheres the profit? the market cap? the billions MORE than "the market leader" in the bank?

MS has always been a company afraid of becoming the next IBM. Just under Gates they were more effective.

Still, MS has strengths that most folks overlook. For one, they know developers and their innovation is centered around SDKs and not UI.

If you look at WPF and Surface they have the underpinnings of making multitouch interface development easy for developers. And XNA has a lot of newbie game devs programming for it. The 360/XNA was in many ways like the iPhone has been for Apple except that since MS already dominated the market it wasn't noticeable. No huge uptick in devs, just the usual younger devs programming for the first time using the MS infrastructure.

The iPhone SDK has been a huge game changer for Apple IMHO. One that MS should be considering very carefully even if there isn't much they can do about it.

Congratulations for sounding like you're part of that 90% you mentioned even if you are a Mac user.

It's arrogant, dumb a** comments like this make me never want to mention the fact that I own a Mac to people. I certainly don't want to be associated with pricks like you, but unfortunately your kind seems to be nearly half of the Apple using population.

Well, looking at yesterdays HP results (hint: profits down 17% and almost identical to Apple's Q2 non-GAAP figure, despite selling four times the volume, and thousands of additional lay-offs), it is obvious where the damage is taking place. This is what you get for targeting market share instead of profits, and advertising cheapness. And this is HP, they still make a fortune by selling high-margin ink and toner cartridges... it will hit others without non-PC income even worse.

Of course these Microsh!t ads are working. Tell anyone they can get something cheaper and they're all for it. I can't want for Snow Leopard to come out and make Windows 7 look like the buggy piece of junk it surly will be.

Amen to that

I first read this on the Dutch ZDNet site and it struck me at just how brainless these interviewed people appearantly are that they fall for these clearly inaccurate ads. How serious can you take these interviewed people or the research company when people are so dramatically (from 0 to 46 and from 70 to 12,something) influenced by false information?

Every person that has actually taken the trouble to shop for 'a laptop' and has checked out the Apple laptops KNOWS there is a fairly priced Mac laptop. Only somebody totally ignorant of this believes these ads. For those I say: you get what you deserve. For the likes of ZDnett etc. that post this news without any comment: where is your journalistic integrity by posting this without putting it in its perspective?

Yeah, Mac users seem to have short term memories when it comes to issues with OS X. I've been using the same Windows XP machine at work for over 2 years and it has never crashed. On top of that, I've had very few programs crash, IE occasionally (just like Safari but without the memory leak), MS Access (because of some poor VB code I had written), and Word.

Last week, my 5th gen iPod decided to stop working properly. iTunes reported it was corrupt when I went to sync it. I restored it and tried to sync but it would freeze in the process after a bit. I wanted to do a surface scan of the hard drive but conveniently Apple removed the HDSCAN option from my model of iPod's service menu. So I figured I could just put it in disk mode and have OS X scan it, but as far as I can tell, OS X doesn't include anything that can do a surface scan. Windows has had that since Windows 95 (heck, it was probably part of MS-DOS for all I know). A google search seemed to indicate that to get the functionality back, I'd have to shell out some money for a program that did a lot more than I needed. As a bonus, in my efforts to fix my iPod, iTunes would lock up and locked up in some strange way that no other program would load after that point without rebooting the iMac. As a double bonus, my iMac stopped shutting down properly several months ago and the only way to restart is to do a hard shutdown via the power button; I tried a very long list of suggestions to correct the shut down problem but nothing worked.

Yep, thank goodness OS X is flawless...

My perception on your comments:
1) Consider that when Snow Leopard delivers on its promise to be faster with smaller footprint in memory use, that is a serious achievement. Vista can't run its modern interface on just any machine and nobody should seriously try to run it on a machine with less than 1 Gb RAM. Mac OS X runs flawlessly with its excellent graphical interface even on older machines. The Windows OS's are like fat, hamburger eating 500 pound mastodonts whereas Mac OS X is a trained hunter cat. That wins you the performance race.
Yesterday a colleague of mine ran an application in IE7 on Vista and it went to use 2,75 Gb of RAM, including swap! The whole machine was slowed down to a crawl... Behold the impact of the leanness of an OS.

2) Most businesses refuse to install Windows Vista and even M$ recently advised to skip it in favour of Windows 7. So basically Vista is a failure, despite the expensive ad campaigns. And the question is if Windows 7 will do much better, looking at the reviews of as good as no speed improvements and little fascinating new features. And then it comes in many flavours of which the top ones are double the price of a new Mac OS X version. If M$ were to upgrade their OS at the speed of Apple, then people would soon see that 'cheap buy' today is 'big bucks' tomorrow.

3) Quality design Windows computers are a rare thing. I used to like the Sony Vaio's (looong ago) as they were stylish, now they are the same cheap looking plastic like most other laptops. My private plastic Apple laptop looks more robust than my business Windows laptop that is 50% more expensive than my Apple. The quality looking hardware of Windows machines are in the same price range of Apple's hardware, so no price hunter from these ads will buy it...

Yeah, pretty much. No threat=no reason to give a crap. After Apple's gains and the charlie foxtrot that was vista, they now give a crap again. They can't afford not to. A change in direction from Apple and they could see Mac OS X competing on their turf.


And they wonder why we've gotten a bad name.


Its not about you, its about keeping the everyday users and right now there are more of those on the Mac platform than Mac users.


The lineup hasn't changed all that much in the last 5 years and most of the improvisation has come the engineering staff trying to fit a computer into the ever shrinking dimensions of Ive's sculptures. It's getting a little too routine.

WOW YOU JUST DID EXACTLY WAHT YOU SAID HE DID .

apple users do get abused when call ing tech supports to phone comp. etc etc
once they hear i have a mac they get weird . and abusive . they never really help

so maybe you can excuse us for being a bit hot headed at times ,

and don't forget its only a box that your embarrassed to say you use .kinda funny huh

I think this sentiment is correct. Mac users are not going to switch to a PC based on cost issues. They, however, might put off a purchase decision based on economic factors. Microsoft's ads might effect Apple's largest growing market of potential PC users who might consider jumping ship where it not for economic concerns.

I have a number of Macs - though I have recently considered the purchase of a Dell Mini 10v - but only because it is possible to load OS X on it. In part because it is inexpensive - $300 or so - and in part because of how small it is - I have two 17" Mac notebooks (G4 and Intel Core2 Duo) along with a Mini an iMac 20" and other various external monitors etc - but when I need to travel light the mini is actually looking like it might provide some advantage over having the iPhone as my only computing device on the road.

I don't doubt that it's true that the ads are hurting Apple. My brother called me yesterday for advice on a laptop. He really wanted a MacBook, but he just doesn't have the money. So we discussed the pros and cons of various PC manufacturers. It was like living through one of those commercials, but without the porn-like ending when they hand the woman a wad of cash. It was as if my brother couldn't afford a hamburger, so I helped him find a half-eaten one in the trash. Sad.

Now for some constructive brainstorming, folks. Apple doesn't have a conquer-the-world mentality like Microsoft. They are content to pick a market and make a ton of money in it, but market share is important. Steve Jobs said that for Apple to succeed, Microsoft doesn't have to lose. So let's pretend we are Apple, and we don't mind if Microsoft has the monopoly problems. How do we counter the effect of the Microsoft ads to grow the Mac? Here are some possibilities:

Make ads that stress value, aimed at the crowd that spends $1,000-$4,000 on a computer, but without ruining the corporate image by appearing to be heartless by deprecating the people who can't afford Macs.

Find a way to make less expensive laptops to compete in the $700-$900 tier within these constraints: 1) don't cripple the features, 2) don't compromise the quality, 3) don't create a lower level of support, 4) maintain profit margins.

Cut prices on existing Macs without creating a backlash from current customers, like what happened with the iPhone

Or some combination of the three.

Anyone have ideas?

That, thank god, they always have had and will continue to have. OSX rules! I'm talking hardware- period. I want to buy another Mac now and nothing appeals presently, quite frankly.

Why the f@ck would a consumer care about Apples market cap, or stock price?

AI should set up a parallel site, and herd into it all of the idiots who constantly reference Apple's financial figures -- as if they have any bearing on the user experience, or value of their products.

That is so true and one of the best posts I've ever read here.

The economy and ads may lure them in, but the inferiority of the OS will undoubtedly cause them to make the switch.

- I started out on a cheap PC, too.

Most people don't even know what an OS is.

Brand Index is a company that you can hire to do these types of surveys. I wonder who hired them to find this information out. A buck says that Microsoft is the client.

[QUOTE=AppleInsider;1419072]Even as critics have attacked Microsoft for bending the truth in its PCs-are-cheaper ad campaign, one firm's research shows that it might be working and turning the public minds, though not necessarily wallets, away from Apple.

After talking regularly with 5,000 people over the course of several months, ad trackers at BrandIndex discovered that Microsoft overtook Apple in value perception scores --

I surely didn't. But after an army of viruses, constant crashes, and the infamous blue screens of death, I learned quickly. I was literally reinstalling Windows a couple of times every week.

This is a good question. Seriously.

The consumer should care for a number of reasons: (i) Companies that are doing poorly on the stock price (etc) front are doing so perhaps because they're selling poor quality products that do not result in a great consumer experience -- i.e., a low stock price is likely correlated with a whole host of underlying product-related issues; (ii) Companies that do well on that front can do more R&D, do better new product development, find the best suppliers to work with, attract better talent (both in the form of employees and software developers), and have a lower cost of capital; (iii) Companies that do poorly on that front have increased risk of financial distress, and therefore increased likelihood of not being able to deliver on implied warranties and promises for the future; (iv) Consumers are also often shareholders, through their retirement plans and such (or even through their personal investments): a company whose stock price does well is obviously better in that regard.

The bottom line is: a high (low) stock price can create a virtuous (vicious) cycle for all stakeholders, including consumers.

These potential customers (if real at all) are obviously idiots and Apple is generally better off without them as they would be a senseless drain on valuable resources and generally lower the brand integrity as people would associated these idiots with the decision to buy Apple.

Overall this is a good thing.

Apple's next Campaign should be something along the lines of ;

Do you seriously believe Microsoft's 'No really, Vista's all fixed now that we've renamed it Windows 7'?
Do you seriously trust this company after all the crooked shit they've pulled over the years??
Are you really going to give money to these crooks?
Are you seriously incapable of ascertaining the true measure of quality?

If Yes, go immediately to PC store and buy cheap crap PC...


Though Apple has gone kind of quiet and a little bit sleepy lately...

Right and in a perfect world people should vote for their politicians based on their policies and not their personalties.
The bottom line: not gonna happen.

Dude, that was some awesome flamebait! It's been years since I saw flamebait this good that wasn't immediately deleted by the moderators, because it takes guts to say publicly that 90% of people are idiots. Lots of people think it, but it takes some real cajones to actually come out and say it.

Okay, let's all be little automaton droids and believe everything we hear on TV.

But seriously, Apple's most appropriate response is an ad addressing TCO--Total Cost of Ownership--because let's face it, that PC will probably cost far more in the long run. want MS Office? it'll cost you hundreds of dollars. let's not forget that antivirus software you'll not only need to purchase, but pay for an annual subscription.

and so on.

I love the way fanboyz rant and rave about "crooks" and "crap" and "trust'. Meanwhile the whole corporate world revolves around Microsoft. Not being a troll, only a realist.

Sorry, but I'm calling BS on this. The only way your statements are true is if you are the most incompetent computer user in the world and then insisted on running Windows on a failing hard drive (which would also make you incompetent).

Or maybe you shouldn't have picked up your copy of XP from a Torrent site.

Really? Consider Apple and GM as two extreme examples. Which one of those four points I made would not apply? (Of course, in the case of GM, substitute 'component suppliers' for 'software developers').

I've been a satisfied MacBook Pro owner for several months now (having used a MacMini and iMac before). Once in a while, I peruse the PC notebook section. The lousy trackpads alone put me off from every buying a PC notebook. I prefer the MacBook Pro trackpad to a mouse. On my Dell notebook at work, I absolutely have to plug in my mouse to use it. The trackpad is totally unusable.

I'm guess Apple must have thousands of patents on the trackpad, which is probably why nobody else has tried to replicated it. Hell, I don't know why PC makers can't just *increase* the size of their trackpads. They're too damn small.

Sounds like bad hardware, user error, or complete bs. If you have the know how to reinstall Windows, you have the know how to install anti virus software.

Constant crashes and blue screens do point to bad ram or something though. If errors seem random, and the computer crashes randomly, I'd run memtest before pointing at Windows to blame. Even Macs have occasional hardware issues.

Postulant points out a problem with PC's though: If you're absolutely brain dead when it comes to this stuff, you're going to have a negative experience with Windows. Paying the premium price for a Mac comes with a much higher level of peace of mind. There's definitely a lot less hassle with the OS, but you get what you pay for. You get a system that the OS was built for, and you get an OS that isn't constantly under a barrage of virus attacks.

Here's what I see happening; Today, the number of young people who know their way around problems with PC's far out number the same group ten years ago. Computers are less confusing to those who grew up with them, and now we're seeing the "elementary school Windows 98 crowd" grown up, with jobs, making their own purchases based on what is most practical to them, and this will influence the market in different ways. As someone who's been building computers since 5th-6th grade, I won't discredit the potential a Mac has, but at the same time I'll defend the practicality of a PC any day.

I notice the same thing, and it was something my mom complained about with her new Asus notebook. I checked out the settings, and after increasing the mouse speed, and touch sensitivity, my mom was ecstatic. But why should anyone need to mess with these settings? The notebook they try out at best buy hasn't been configured this way either, which is why you notice it. It makes no sense to me, but configuring the touch settings is just something these companies assume people will understand.

Oh also, what amazed me was on her notebook, the asus multitouch stuff was disabled by default. Once I enabled it, she said it was like I gave her a whole new touch pad. Using two fingers to scroll up and down on webpages seems to be her favorite thing about it.

I not saying your points don't apply. I'm saying only that the average consumer could care less about them when they buy anything- period. That's why Apple has to invade WalMArt now - to go after those that don't follow any of your points.

I almost didn't know if I should respond to this. This comment is so disgustingly ignorant it probably doesn't doesn't deserve attention from anybody. You say Apple is better off without stupid people, and yet here you are, saying things like this.

The PC trackpads are still too small, even if it's possible to enable multi-touch on them. The lack of physical buttons allows Apple to make theirs bigger, which gives me twice as much scroll space on one swipe of my finger.