Posted on 08/13/2008 12:35:25 AM PDT by Schnucki
WERE advertisements rather than sales the yardstick, Apple would have dominated the computer industry for decades. First there was the legendary spot “1984”, in that same year, which is often considered the best ad in history. Directed by Ridley Scott, then basking in “Blade Runner” fame, and produced by Chiat/Day, Apple’s advertising agency to this day, it depicted Apple as the individualist and cool brand, in contrast to oppressive conformity, then understood to mean IBM.
Ever since then, the same man, Lee Clow, at what is now TBWA\Chiat\Day, part of Omnicom, a giant marketing group, has been socking it to Apple’s bigger rival, Microsoft. His deadliest work yet is the current “Get a Mac” campaign—better known by its opening lines: “Hello, I’m a Mac—and I’m a PC.” In the American version of the ad, a suave Mac, played by Justin Long, an actor, contrasts with a lovable but decidedly uncool PC, played by John Hodgman, a comedian who has been catapulted to celebrity as a result. The upshot, as ever: Apple’s Mac types are elegantly effective; Microsoft’s PC folks are bumbling plodders.
All this puts Microsoft in the awkward position of having its brand image defined by a rival—despite its own vast advertising budget, which towers above Apple’s. But Microsoft has also made Apple’s task a lot easier. It has made software that, by comparison with Apple’s, is buggy and clunky. Most notoriously, Microsoft’s latest operating system, Windows Vista, was first delayed for years, then launched to dreadful reviews and is now selling more slowly than expected, even after big price cuts.
So Microsoft is fighting back. A preliminary salvo, fired last month, was the so-called “Mojave Experiment”—a focus group in San Francisco of 140 volunteers who had not actually tried Vista but professed that they had heard awful things about it. They were then treated to ten-minute demos by a trained expert of a “new” operating system, allegedly called Mojave. They liked what they saw, and when told that this product was in fact Vista, they gasped in shock and delight. The climactic moments, naturally, are available for viewing at www.mojaveexperiment.com.
You could be forgiven for wondering whether Apple had commissioned the advertisement. It was Microsoft at its worst. The “experiment” addressed none of the problems with Vista—the trouble starts when ordinary consumers, not experts, try to use it with their existing hardware—and it felt as authentic as “reality” television.
But Microsoft is also preparing a much bigger attack. Earlier this year the firm caused a stir when it passed over its previous advertising agencies and chose Crispin Porter + Bogusky, arguably the hottest agency today, to put together a campaign rumoured to be costing $300m. Crispin’s brief is to come up with an answer to Apple’s campaign that does not feel reactive, and somehow makes Microsoft look cool.
By reputation, Crispin, based in Miami and Boulder, Colorado, might be the one agency that could pull off such a miracle. Its creative star is Alex Bogusky, though he has now risen to management level. In recent years, Crispin has revived, among other brands, Burger King, while coming up with admired campaigns for the Mini and Volkswagen. That said, there have also been flops, such as the baffling “Algorithm” campaign for Ask.com, which seemed to promote its larger rival Google.
Making Microsoft sexy is certain to be Crispin’s biggest challenge yet, as its creative types are surely aware—since they, in line with the rest of their industry, overwhelmingly own and use Macs. But it may be possible. Apple’s campaign has left itself vulnerable in at least one unforeseen way. Although everyone watching its spots agrees that Macs are cooler, most people also adore Mr Hodgman’s PC. By contrast, Mr Long’s Mac comes across as mildly but increasingly smug and irritating.
Vista launches programs if you let the cursor sitting where it shouldn’t, it has a mind of it’s own. Double launches as well.
The keypad is not smooth, takes forever to move and “jumps” far worse than an LED mouse. Makes it difficult when it’s one step forward and two back. Way too sensitive, maybe I can adjust that.
My intention was always to supplement the touchpad with a wireless mouse and keyboard combo.
Try to copy a video file and Windows Media launches just highlighting the file to attempt the transfer.
I haven’t gotten to the point where I’ve turned off all the annoying “permissions” BS either. I was hoping to get XP Pro from my old machine moved to this one.
I’ve been on some forums and contacted HP directly for instructions on updating to XP Pro and the message is consistent. Drivers are the issue.
This notebook has a webcam and a mic which are not supported in XP, and something called HP Quickplay won’t work either without Vista. I don’t care about any of them, but I do want the SATA drive to run at SATA speed, not IDE and the other stuff to work, Wi-Fi, modem if I ever need it, all USB stuff, etc. You get the drift.
Or I’ll be the first one to buy into the MS replacement the Chinese put out. I’ve got Linux, never tried it.
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Install Ubuntu Linux ,,, you can make a new partition for it with built in Vista tools and run it dual-boot for a while ... you’ll like it.
I suggest you wipe out the hard drive and install Suse Linux Desktop. I have installed it on several PCs with different configurations and different generations of CPU. It always, and I mean always comes up properly and everything works, mice, video, sound, NICs, etc.
Suse Linux is a very polished platform.
(www.novell.com/solutions/desktop/)
By the way, the first response from HP took less than 6 hours after I bought the laptop.
I spent most of the time setting stuff up and making Restore DVDs.
I noticed what a POS Vista was in very short order. It was never my intention to continue to run it.
Only question is do I take the plunge and go to XP Pro or wait for an alpha crippled crap version of Longhorn.
Have you tried it with a laptop?
There were all kinds of warnings about how the native resolution of the monitor was 1680 x 1050 and you had to install a driver disk to make it work.
Out of the freakin' box, and it doesn't even work right.
After figuring out that the Windows message about a DLL crashing (also right out of the box) doesn't matter, I loaded the driver and all is well.
My 4-year old Mac didn't have a 1680x1050 option available (I normally run at 1900x1600), so I was dubious, but I hooked up the monitor and it just worked. It just bloody worked. The 1680x1050 option was there (it knew I had connected a different monitor). It chose that resolution automatically. No driver installs, no configuration tweaking, no "DLL has crashed" messages, it just worked. I can even rotate the image 90 or 180 or 270 degrees, just like the Vista version. If I could have moved my Virtual PC's XP onto a PARALLELS machine I would have bought a new Mac.
I read about this site on here more than a year ago:
http://www.goodbye-microsoft.com
from which one can download the Debian flavor free.
One of my desktop boxes is dual-boot, so I can go back to XP when I need to retrieve old files or emails, but generally run it in Debian.
Three laptops are running Debian as is another old 733 MHz box-which now runs far faster than my neighbor's Vista laptop .
No hardware issues, free updates all the time, cross-compatible between MS Office and (Free) Open Office, Evolution email client is an Outlook look-alike, except that it runs. Free graphics editing sotware, etc..etc.
There really is no reason to suffer with MS unless one has to have the latest game, etc.. For WORK, e-mail, web stuff, the Linux flavors are fine.
Never, never, never seen a crash on any of these computers, not even on the fossil 733.
Not according to Consumer Reports. The only category where HP surpasses Dell is the "business" (i.e. high-end) laptop. Dell beats HP in the low-cost laptop and desktop catefories.
For those interested, Lenovo #1, Toshiba #2, Dell #3 in the low-end laptop category.
We have a number of Dell laptops and desktops, and they have performed admirably. No "deaders" yet.
One of the computers I use at work has Vista. It is so much worse than OSX that it isn’t even funny. It takes a lot more fiddling to keep that computer humming along than my two Macs which just plain work without giving me any aggravation and without requiring any fiddling.
Anyone willing to lay a bet on when Microsh!t tosses the towel in on Vista?
My prediction is it will not last another 9 months.
I am using XP, Firefox on a 4 year old HP, everything works just fine.
problem is its in the name, everyone has this mental image of Vista being junk, myself I have never tried it but I would not even treat this like green eggs and ham, I won’t even consider trying it.
There, fixed it.
Apple is producing excellent products these days. Using a Mac is rather like finding a cold glass of water after being lost in the desert for a few days... ;-)
The bundled software more than makes up for any price difference.
I’m building a machine for my kids and I plan to slap Vista Ultimate on it. They deserve it.
My reliance on productivity apps such a s Quickeys keeps me from going to Vista. Why won't they work in XP "compatibility mode"?
I have 5 PC's at home 2 running XP, and 3 running VISTA. I have not had any of the experiences you have had with VISTA so far. The only thing I can say about VISTA is that as a long time windows user, I find the new menus very annoying. Then again, I also went though the same experience with Win2K after NT4.0.
As for the drivers issues, again, that is a hardware manufacturer issue, if they want to supply XP drivers they can, they have chosen not to. The Security pop-up is a direct result of VISTA not “leaving the doors wide open” by default. For many years one of the biggest complaints against MS was the fact that they had basically a wide open OS after the default install. Now that they have closed those doors, the system expects you to give permission when an application is doing something that is a possible risk to the OS. Speaking as someone who works in software development, a good deal of those requests are the result of poorly written programs that expect administrator access to run.
Here is my recommendation to you. First, adjust the touch pad sensitivity so that it is not picking up your taps as clicks. If you want to you can even turn off tapping and only use the buttons (for you this is probably best). Go to the control panel, select the classic view and select mouse. On the mouse dialog select the advanced tab, and click on advanced feature settings button. From there it is HW specific, but on this laptop I select pointer speed and tapping button, and on the next page uncheck the enable tapping check box. Then select OK all of the way out. It is also possible you have a touch-pad tray icon, if so right click on that and go to settings to do basically what I described above.
You also can go back to the “Classic Look and Feel” by right clicking on your desktop, select personalize, and then themes. Select Classic under the themes drop down.
I hope this helps.
This is the rub. As bad as Vista is, moving to a Mac for me is unacceptable. I have far too many applications which simply aren't available on Mac. Dozens of them. And I used to use a Mac for almost 20 years, and am far more productive on PC. So I am stuck with MS.
They let Jobs go.
Actually their near downfall came circa 1995 when MSFT actually began putting out the superior product.
You can use Windows on a Mac. Everything will run.
You can find this out before spending a couple thousand dollars.
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