Microsoft may have shot itself in the foot trying to respond to the Mac blogosphere

The beauty of Microsoft's new PC advertising campaign was its simplicity. Everyone knows, even the Mac faithful, that you pay a premium to purchase Mac. The original Lauren ad kept the theme simple. No discussion of hardware or software specifications, just an assumption of what an average consumer needed in a computing platform. I think Microsoft hit their mark.

Now Microsoft is trying to respond to complaints from the Mac blogosphere by subsidizing an Apple tax white paper written by Endpoint Technologies Associates president Roger Kay. In doing so Microsoft may have shot themselves in the foot. The basic problem with the white paper is that it does not offer a balanced view for the total cost of ownership (TCO) between a Mac and PC. As I mentioned before we all know the Mac is more expensive, quantifying that difference in TCO is much harder to do. Roger Kay tries to run up the pricing difference by adding purely optional items, he distracts from the base price of the computers. He also allows the Mac blogosphere to have a field day.

I don't know what Microsoft executives where thinking when they decided to publish this whitepaper; the beauty of the Apple Mac vs. PC ads was that for the most part they kept the concept simple; the Mac is better than a PC.

I think Microsoft's pricing argument is excellent and they hit their mark with the Lauren ad, they veered away slightly with the Gaimpaolo ad, but I think came back on message with the Lisa and Jackson ad. Why bother with a whitepaper, it is as if you were trying to show that the Mac blogosphere has a point, ignoring them while hammering the price message would have been a much wiser decision.

Comments

[Chris Carlin]

By the way, the topic of these new commercials came up when I was hanging out with a bunch of average, non-technical, non-Mac fans the other day, and the response was, for the most part, confusion.

The consensus was that this campaign is a trainwreck, like a bad reality game show. "How did that money work again? Why do they act so surprised to get paid at the end of the commercial if they knew they'd be getting paid, and if they were shopping for themselves, why were they paid at all? And why bury the message in this ginned up drama... complete with mentions that Macs are better?"

I hadn't really been thinking in those terms, but I saw where my friends were coming from. To them these commercials certainly didn't say anything new--do people really not know Macs are a premium brand? And wouldn't they quickly discover that and move on with their shopping anyway?--but only portrayed confusion about the computer buying process.

I'm not sure why you find these commercials so successful. Certainly they could have communicated their message more effectively in other ways.

[Stephen Skarlatos]

Very interesting, I have gotten a 180 degree view from my friends who are not involved with technology. They want a laptop for browsing, email, some word processing, music (iTunes) and basic photo manipulation. They are interested in value, screen size, weight and color. I am always amused about the color piece, I am a big fan of the Lenovo ThinkPad laptops, which come in basic black, and have a hard time convincing them to take look at the ThinkPad. Back to the point they find the ads hit their mark and some pointed it out that they were surprised about the Sony VAIO which is viewed as a high end brand.