New Microsoft commercial, featuring Jerry Seinfeld and Bill Gates

[notyoueither]

Didn't you already cash in the Big Top Points?

Won't they say no-taksie-backsies?

[Aeson]

I've got it all figured out. I tell them I don't want my vacation after all, and so they can have it back (eg. they ship me back to CA). Then I can take all the shoes back. I haven't even worn half of them.

If they don't go for it, I'll just return all 3500 pairs to Wal-Mart and say I got them for a birthday present and my grandma lost the receipt.

[notyoueither]

Which Seinfeld cast member is most likely to have come up with that plan?

[Aeson]

None of them... it's my own plan! (And I wasn't a cast member, except in spirit.)

...it's far too simplistic and not conniving enough for George.

...Jerry would have just shrugged the whole thing off and it'd have worked out for him anyways.

...Kramer would have worn the shoes as he went to return them one pair at a time. And probably ruined each pair on the way and/or had to figure out some way to get a new pair of shoes to wear on his way back home.

...I think Elaine probably had 3500 pairs of shoes. She would've just kept them all.

Of course an episode in Utah... that could've been like the finale anyways...

[Aeson]

... Newman!

[notyoueither]

Maybe Newman?

[Aeson]

I could see Newman buying 3500 pairs of shoes for the points, spending the points, and then returning all the shoes for a refund. (It would all have to be by mail order though...)

[notyoueither]

It should have been an episode, or part thereof.

I'll bet Jerry is regreting pulling the plug now. All he needed was a little Apolyton as a jolt to the about nothing meme.

[Naked Gents Rut]

John Hodgman is infinitely cooler than Justin Long.

Ironically, John Hodgman is far more of a smug elitist in real life than Justin Long is, being a former contributor to McSweeney's, humor editor at The New York Times Magazine and sometimes host of a lecture series in Williamsburg. Long is just a modestly successful actor.

[Agathon]

Originally posted by -Jrabbit
It's a long overdue initiative by MS, which has callously (some might say smugly) neglected its brand. I really hope the campaign is good, because it's clear I will be seeing it incessantly.

The sudden disappearance of Seinfeld is a mystery, as his $10MM contract was loudly trumpeted just 4 weeks ago, with a whole "featured pitchman" vibe. And that amounts to a couple quirky vignettes? I don't think so.

The whole campaign was a gigantic toilet [vader]and now its failure is complete![/vader]

The Mac/PC adverts are successful because they are funny. Hodgman and Long play well off each other, with Long as the straight man (which is more difficult to pull off as Hodgman himself has admitted).

Whether or not you like one of them more than the other is not the point. The point is that you laughed and came away with some boring piece of information about how bad Vista is, or how OS X has Time Machine.

Frankly, I think they suck ass, but the only Apple ads I really liked were the ones that Jeff Goldblum was in, because he was much funnier than Hodgman.

But who cares in the end. The facts are that Apple's sales are up, because they made the cost of switching lower and because their major competitor shipped an OS that a lot of its users think is arse.

And Microsoft responds with an ad campaign that highlights their inability to connect with customers.

You could not make it up.

[Imran Siddiqui]

From Asher's article, this is the most important part:

At first, “the ads were ambiguous and confounding to some,” said Ted Marzilli, senior vice president and general manager of the brand group at the New York office of YouGovPolimetrix, a research company, but as they continued they helped improve perceptions about Microsoft.

On Sept. 4, when the teaser ads started, the “buzz” about Microsoft was 25 percent positive and 13 percent negative, Mr. Marzilli said, and by Tuesday it was 28 percent positive and 8 percent negative. Microsoft “has been beat up pretty badly by the Apple advertisements in the last six months,” he said. “These are strong numbers, good numbers, for Microsoft.”

Another research company, Zeta Interactive, using what it calls its Relevant Noise tool to mine places online like blogs and message boards for brand conversations, found what was described as overwhelmingly positive buzz surrounding Microsoft from Sept. 3 through Monday.

Of the posts analyzed by Relevant Noise during that stage of the teaser campaign, 63 percent were characterized as positive and 37 percent as negative.

“It did what it needed to do,” said Rob Reilly, partner and co-executive creative director at Crispin Porter in Boulder, Colo., and Miami. “People who got it, got it.”

Now the groundwork has been laid, I'm betting some of the other ads will focus on the internet interaction with the customer base and the re-establishing of what "I'm a PC" means in the real world.

[Asher]

Hands up if anyone here cares even the slightest about Agathon's opinion on a MS ad campaign?

The facts are that Apple's sales are up, because they made the cost of switching lower and because their major competitor shipped an OS that a lot of its users think is arse.

I will point out that Mac's sales growth is slowing, even as we head back into the back to school time. And reality check -- they're readily available everywhere and still with a tiny percentage of the market.

While Apple's ads were successful in some respects (they did increase sales), they still don't connect to most consumers (or even a significant proportion) to make them buy Mac.

And before we get into a tiff about expectations, Microsoft went from 0 to ~20% marketshare with the Xbox (1) in only a few years, and then upped that again with the 360. The right marketing and the right content can sell a platform. Apple's got niche marketing and niche products, and they still think they can use that to break into the mainstream.

[Alinestra Covelia]

Originally posted by Asher
Hands up if anyone here cares even the slightest about Agathon's opinion on a MS ad campaign?

Well to be fair I give his uninformed, layman's opinion expressed on a messageboard about the same weight as I give to anybody else's uninformed, layman's opinion expressed on a messageboard.

Which is to say I read it for the lulz.

So, :handsup:

[Asher]

I'd just read an article in the paper on how Mac virtualization software sales are soaring. They also don't have figures for how many people use Bootcamp to run Windows on a Mac (I'd imagine it's a massive number, given how many people I know who do it -- more than run OS X, anyway).

It seems to me it indicates that Apple's sales boost cannot soley be attributed to the ad campaign. It's actually more likely, IMO, that sales have gone up because of the Intel processors and support for Bootcamp and apps like Parallels. It's not that they buy a Mac and use OS X, it's that they buy a Mac for the hardware then use Windows. I wouldn't be surprised if the marketshare of active OS X users is about even. And even for users of OS X, the staggering sales of virtualization software seems to indicate more and more people are acknowledging that OS X doesn't do what they want -- they still need to rely on Windows. Go figure.

[Kidlicious]

Asher,

"What follows is an audacious embrace of the disdainful label that Apple, Microsoft’s rival, has gleefully — and successfully — affixed onto users of Microsoft products: “I’m a PC.”

That's from your own nytimes source. Read the I'm a PC commericals are successful.

So now MS is copying them. That's going to help APPLE probably more than MS. The end goal for both companies though is to build brand loyalty. They don't care as much about competing as you think.