I’m A PC And… WTF?

September 19, 2008 at 1:42 PM · Filed under MS / Windows, The Internet

Microsoft’s newest rounds of ads directly target Apple’s highly succesful “Get A Mac” ads. He’s back. Yep, your old friend PC. But wait! Hey… that’s not the “real” PC! You guessed it. Microsoft has a PC look-alike sporting the latest rounds of the $300M budget Bill Gates Co. has shelled out to let people know that it’s okay to be stuck with Vista. No, really.. you’re in good hands because The Apple Store is right down the street.

Check the rest of them out on YouTube by searching for “I’m A PC.”

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Olly said,

September 19, 2008 @ 2:13 PM

Unfortunately, I think these adverts will create a sense of ‘PC Nationalism’ among arguably less informed Windows users. Once again, these ads represent Microsoft’s ‘fear of the unknown’ tactics going to work in an aim to slow mac growth. Note, however, the lack of actual fact (even the implied kind) used in this series of videos.

Hopefully, Apple will respond. Maybe this is the end for the “I’m a Mac, I’m a PC” series…

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Richard said,

September 19, 2008 @ 2:17 PM

I’m not sure it will end it, but Apple will have to re-think (Think Different) their strategy until Microsoft copies them again. And see, that’s just it — copy. They’re not improving and you figure most copies are just poorer versions of the original.

So, PC wears glasses. I’m afraid my laptop, even when it had Vista pre-installed from Dell didn’t wear glasses. The similarities that are reality have to do with errors, incompatibility, etc. not glasses or jeans. Microsoft can’t build the “Togetherness” that Apple product users have. Just like transparency, security, and a number of other things, Microsoft is late again.

Better late than never, right? Yeah right.

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Justin said,

September 19, 2008 @ 8:58 PM

To tell you the truth, I can’t believe Microsoft is copying them. Then again I can’t believe the complete arrogance mac users and Apple themselves have. I’d rather be the PC in work clothes then an indie hipster. Last time I checked, indie hipsters make it nowhere in life and our what society considers a modern go nowhere hippie. They always look for some reason to pull out their iphone and prove how cool they are that they can look up what you’re having a conversation about. You have an iphone, I get it, and Steve Jobs is infallible, blah blah blah.

This reminds me of the other thing I notice in mac users. They are trying to be different and stick it to the man. Welcome to reality, you are not sticking it to the man when you go buy a complete proprietary machine. In fact, you are doing the exact opposite of what you preach. If you want to stick it to the man, try an OS that works on almost anything with a central processing unit of almost any architecture called Linux.

Ever notice windows users don’t walk around with a sense of entitlement? Or walk around and talk about how Bill Gates is God? Find ways to bring up how great their OS is in almost any conversation? Thats right, windows users are not arrogant-know-everything-im-so-cool-hipsters.

Your last sentence is exactly what I’m talking about; “you’re in luck because the apple store who will sell you an overpriced macbook with identical components to a cheap dell is right down the street”.

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Andrew said,

September 20, 2008 @ 1:56 PM

This is really an interesting piece of advertising. While it fails completely to deliver any specific information about the operating system, I think it’s likely that it will be effective in making people more comfortable with owning PC’s.

It seems to me that recently Microsoft made an important choice in their advertising campaigns - rather than attempting to convince the computer-literate that Vista is in fact better than Leopard (which I think most people would agree would be an extremely difficult thing to do at this point), they’ve decided to focus their attempts on the “common” user - those who don’t really care enough to do any real research about the operating system they’re buying, and will be perfectly willing to buy a computer based on advertising alone. Windows users are not the only ones who fall into this category - so do those who will buy an overpriced Macbook without even considering a non-Mac laptop for half the price.

And I’m not saying that this demographic is necessarily stupid, or wrong to not care or know much about the computers they buy - they are no worse than I am for buying a car and not looking into what kind of engine it has. But I do think that they are exactly the kind of people who will fall easy prey to the type of bullshit advertising that emphasizes the “personality” of a computer, rather than its functionality. The reality is that for the common user, Vista can probably get the job done - albeit with more frustration and less user-friendliness - but this is a reality that Microsoft stopped pointing out long ago.

What Microsoft’s ads seem to be saying here is that it’s “okay” to still use Vista, and that “lots of people still do”. They defend themselves not as a company that makes software, but as a company that’s attempting to produce some kind of lifestyle - and while the message is bullshit, I can’t say that it isn’t clever.

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