Microsoft released a new commercial last night. It’s part of their $300 Million dollar ad campaign to try and revamp their image after the Vista fiasco. The first two advertisements in their new ad campaign were pretty awful. It had Bill Gates and Jerry Seinfeld, and the ads really made no sense. Some people joked that the ads were like the Seinfeld show, they were commercials about nothing. Now, they did get people’s attention, but not exactly in a good way.

The new advertisement is better than the first two. You can watch it on the Microsoft site if you haven’t seen it yet. The new commercial has a Microsoft employee that happens to look like the PC guy, from the “I’m a Mac, I’m a PC” Apple commercials. He starts off by saying, “I’m a PC, and I’ve been stereotyped”, then it goes on to show a lot of people saying that they are a PC and that they do important things. The thing that the marketing company, and a lot of other people in the forums talking about the commercial seem to miss, is in the Apple commercial, the two guys are supposed to represent computers. That’s why they say “I’m a PC”, not, “I’m a PC user”. Apple is saying that PCs are boring, beige boxes that people hide under their desk, because they look bad, while Apple computers are great looking machines that people are proud to display. It seems that a lot of people, including the marketing firm that did these commercials, seems to think that Apple was saying Mac users are young and hip while PC users are guys in suits; which isn’t what the ads say.

I did see a funny quote. The tag line of the new Windows campaign is, “Life without walls”. If you have no walls, you don’t need Windows : )

Another funny thing, apparently the ad talking about how great it is to be a PC, was created on a Mac.

Tags: microsoft