Never tickle a sleeping dragon
Wednesday, July 23, 2008 by Amber
We've all laughed at the commercials. Giggled at cuteness of Justin Long. Begrudgingly admitted that Mac had the leg up on PC as a marketing tool.
But no more. Microsoft is biting back, and it's biting back hard. Redmond is launching a new ad campaign aimed not at disparaging its competitor's products, like Apple does, but at reminding people that, while Apple's white branding and spokespeople are alluring, they are still the little fish in a great big pond.
By thanking its current Vista customers -- who number in the hundreds of millions, going on licences alone -- for giving their business to what is clearly the best OS in the wild right now, Microsoft will quietly bully its way to the front of consumers' minds once again, where it belongs.
You see, the commercials are right -- you're either a Mac person or a PC person (and by PC, I, like Apple, mean Microsoft), and I am a fairly outspoken PC person. I have purposely ignored the iPod, the iPhone and the candy-colored bubbles Apple calls computers. I love my Zune and my Dell as much as I love my right-click button.
I hope Microsoft continues to wake up from its marketing stupor and bites the head off Mac, forcing it into a gadget-only niche market reserved for GPS devices and cellphone manufacturers.
Never tickle a sleeping dragon, lest the dragon remind you why it's a dragon in the first place.
But no more. Microsoft is biting back, and it's biting back hard. Redmond is launching a new ad campaign aimed not at disparaging its competitor's products, like Apple does, but at reminding people that, while Apple's white branding and spokespeople are alluring, they are still the little fish in a great big pond.
By thanking its current Vista customers -- who number in the hundreds of millions, going on licences alone -- for giving their business to what is clearly the best OS in the wild right now, Microsoft will quietly bully its way to the front of consumers' minds once again, where it belongs.
You see, the commercials are right -- you're either a Mac person or a PC person (and by PC, I, like Apple, mean Microsoft), and I am a fairly outspoken PC person. I have purposely ignored the iPod, the iPhone and the candy-colored bubbles Apple calls computers. I love my Zune and my Dell as much as I love my right-click button.
I hope Microsoft continues to wake up from its marketing stupor and bites the head off Mac, forcing it into a gadget-only niche market reserved for GPS devices and cellphone manufacturers.
Never tickle a sleeping dragon, lest the dragon remind you why it's a dragon in the first place.
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Amber Plante is your guide through the geektastic worlds of science, technology and pop culture -- the Q to your James Bond, the Cortana to your Master Chief and the McGonagall to your Harry Potter, so to speak. She makes the technobabble make sense and shows you the fantastic wired world of the Internet in a whole new light. Are you a geek, too? Don't worry, you're in good company.