“When Steve Jobs came back [to Apple], one of the first things he did was run a razor over the product lines, to make them easy to differentiate and easy to choose between,”Mark Webster blogs or The New Zealand Herald.
Now, “Microsoft is looking increasingly like Apple did in the mid ’90s. Which version of Vista would you like? Have fun choosing,” Webster writes. “Another factor may be security. Despite the half-decade struggle by Microsoft to protect Windows against malicious software, it’s spreading faster than ever. The New York Times says “As more business and social life has moved onto the Web, criminals thriving on an underground economy of credit card thefts, bank fraud and other scams rob computer users of an estimated $100 billion a year… There has been a 43 percent jump in malware removed from Windows computers just in the last half year. This is according to Microsoft’s own monitoring.”
Webster writes, “Microsoft’s latest ad campaigns were supposed to seize the initiative from Apple but they don’t look to have succeeded. Despite hiring maverick ad firm Crispin Porter & Bogusky (whose principles are Mac users, by the way) to run the campaign, it doesn’t seem to have made much impact. The agency’s latest idea is … ‘softwear.’ It’s T-shirts, geddit? Microsoft T-shirts. ‘Soft wear’. To me, that smacks of desperation. Where’s that razor when you need it?”
Full article here.
Microsoft ought to try selling Emperor Gates’ clothes instead; they’re still new, never been worn, and they’d generate 100% pure profit.
Steve Jobs would have no interest in saving MIcrosoft. He would probably buy some of their assets (such as Microsoft Office) and then let Microsoft go.
Why save Microsoft. They are the source of switch customers that are dropping that turd Windows OS for OS X. Microsoft’s Office for Mac is all they have and they will become just another software vendor after Apple bleeds them dry of customers.
Why save Microsoft? They have dug their own grave, and I for one, will be happy to see them lying in it.
Not me. Without Microsoft Apple will become…. wait for it….
Microsoft.
dhdave, you sound like one of those armchair philosophers who get all trippy over questions like “if a tree falls in the forest and no one is there to hear it, does it make a sound?” Microsoft is not a vacuum that needs to be filled.
Oscar Wilde couldn’t have come up with a more elegant take.
I’ll ask the obvious question.
Why would Steve Jobs want to save Microsoft?
This question is tantamount to treason! However …..
Microsoft should milk Vista for what it’s worth and give the money back to their shareholders.
I say let Microsoft collapse under its own hubris and stupidity; but then again, ol’Bill will probably phone Billary or our new Sainted Emperor-President on his Zune and demand a handout from the Fed’s magical mystery money printing machine.
Perhaps Steve could offer ex-MS employees the option to repent their sins and convert to Apple’s gospel for a better future instead?
Do you know that yhw is why spelled backwards?
@Oltenaut
And you darn well beat me to it!
@CourtJester
You too.
@Metryq
If Microsoft is deserted because its former customers switch to Mac, is there anyone to hear its adverts?
It’s too late for even Steve Jobs to save M$.
Vista is just the visible part of the MS iceberg.
They have a lot of back office / server based products that most of us know little to nothing about. Some are almost decent.
MS needs to close the book on the failed Zune experiment. They’re not even trying anymore, it’s sad. This xmas’s Zunes looks exactly like last xmas’s zunes. No innovation at all, just pathetic.
@qka
And that’s probably the only reason why MS will even be around in the next few years. Sadly, even if there was a mass exodus from Windows in the home consumer market, MS is so entrenched in enterprise market that it is effectively joined at the hip.
Plus, MS is big with both federal and state government so for that reason especially — MS probably wouldn’t be allowed to be reduced to the software company it started out as.
It’s a shame incompetence is tolerated and rewarded rather than punished by the market as it would be naturally, as Apple experienced once upon a time.
It’s MS’s turn.
Recently, I’ve seen some Mojave tv advertisements. The funny thing is that they try to show “regular” users who didn’t realize how good Vista is; but they show three pairs of people, and two of the pairs are from the SAME family. In their “I’m pissy” ads, they seem to show a cast of thousands who are pissy, but in Mojave, they can’t seem to find anyone so they need to use 4 members of the same family.
I’m going to go out on a limb here and say I would LIKE to see Microsoft saved. Jobs won’t do it, he has no reason to, but I would like to see someone step up and focus on product quality instead of market share. We’d be better served by that than the dragging, agonizing slow death we are seeing under monkeyboy Uncle Fester…
ps I actually showed the monkeyboy video to a MS consultant once…they claimed to have never seen it…
One can’t really speak of Microsoft as “beleaguered”. It’s still living high on monopoly profits from the Office and Windows franchises. They’ll be living off that cash flow for years to come.
But when that game winds down, the market will do its thing. Box assemblers will have to start more productive businesses. The thousands of US, Canadian, Indian, Israeli and Chinese programmers now wedded to Microsoft will put their talents to more creative purposes. Freed of the shackles of “Windows compatibility”, the computer industry will show us what it can really do. It’s called “creative destruction”.
Save them! I can’t wait to get my shovel and throw dirt on the grave. And why would Jobs want to save MS?
— “The agency’s latest idea is … ‘softwear.’ It’s T-shirts, geddit? Microsoft T-shirts. ‘Soft wear’. —
So according to that statement, they’re basing an advertising campaign on old looking icons. A floppy disk? How stupid are these people?
Microsofties just keep on “Riding the Dinosaur!”
@Raymond in DC
That’s true, but how will you convince almost every single industry/government on earth to switch from MS? There’s no doubt the market WANTS to offer something beyond Windows, but there’s so many (sadly) vested interests in keeping the status quo, which prevents the market from doing its job.
Apple (and others) should simply keep on their toes and gradually ware the MS monolith down; ‘death by a thousand cuts’.
In addition to my above post:
All that said, Apple and other tech companies can certainly focus on MS’s greatest weakness, the home consumer market. Even if it isn’t dislodged from dominance altogether, Apple can wrest a massive chunk of the home market and isolate MS in the glacier slow enterprise market, instead.
Steve saving Microsoft is like Dirty Harry emptying a clip into the punk and then running over and starting CPR.
Not going to happen.
loopy_nj,
Apple buy that behemoth of spaghetti code called Office?
Now, that is loopy.
Microsoft is tapping a company called “Common” for the t-shirts. How appropriate.