“Don’t even get [me] started on its claims about Office compatibility,” Electronista writes. “That Microsoft conveniently omits its own Office for Mac suite makes it clear that truth is far from its top priority here.”
Electronista writes, “The list goes on. But, more than the individual items, the Microsoft ‘PC versus Mac‘ page stinks of the desire to show a brave face in the hopes of turning consumers off to Macs. Admittedly, Windows 7 is a fine operating system that, as I write this, is working quite well. And some of the items Microsoft lists on the page are valid. But that doesn’t mean that the site should exist in the first place.”
Full article here.
What about the whole, “never mention the competition in your ads” rule?
next up, fax vs. tweet, abacus vs. calculus, vapourware vs. ifart
First rule of advertising: never mention your competition.
Second rule of advertising: if you’re the leader, never break rule #1.
“Never mentioned your competitor in advertising”. Sounds like a few folks have forgotten the Mac vs. PC ads Apple ran for years.
It’s amazing how Windows Fanboys blame the Mac vs PC adds for the mass exodus of Windows to Mac users. Windows Vista/7 is the real reason.
@tbsteph PC is a generic term… That doesn’t refer to Dell, Microsoft, HP, etc…
A lot of the fake tweets are hilarious (you can see that they are fake because if you watch long enough they start to repeat – not exactly live like M$ claims). One touts the fact that you can have Winblows 7 automatically change the desktop picture at a set interval. Hmmm….I think came to OS X in 10.2? 10.3? Another one disingenuously implies that you can’t have more than one monitor attached to a Mac.
What about the part regarding the Apple Tax that Ballmer and company were touting so much? Why not compare Apple Tax vs Microsoft Tax.
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Shhhh, we like the free advertisement. Don’t tell Sony either.
Tbsteph,
Apple wasn’t the market leader of course and still only has a fraction of the computer market.
Too bad there was not a link to Microsoft’s PC vs Mac page. I needed a good laugh today.
I like our strategy; I like it a lot.
Pathetic! You mean I have to buy a CABLE to connect my Mac to a TV set? Oh, the horror!
It’s pretty revealing that Microsoft is still focusing attention on the desktop arena with this “Vs.” web page. Granted, Windows is the company’s bread and butter and still a cash cow, but to engage in this type of comparison is almost a tacit admission that they’ve royally screwed up their mobile ambitions, so they’re lapsing into self-congratulation in an area that Apple conceded to them a long time ago, at least in terms of market share. It plainly smacks of insecurity and ego boosting.
Apple has moved on to be poised to dominate the mobile computing landscape with an array of well-designed and well-received products, while Microsoft’s absence of compelling products and a cohesive strategy reveals the internal dysfunction within the company.
Ms will not stop till they have 100% of the market, plain greed.
someone in the forums over there had a really good idea: MS should be welcoming Mac users to buy a copy of Windows instead of trying to alienate them. You know, push Windows’ strengths (essentially added program compatibility). Macs can run Windows too, MS, and you’ll probably make more money selling that retail copy of Windows 7 than you would if a Mac user got hit on the head hard enough to ditch his Mac for a cookie-cutter Windows PC.
Mac VS PC was effective because it highlighted Macs’ clear strengths (including being able to run Windows), so why is MS acting like it’s HP or Dell, trying to get people to stop using a Mac when they could just say “Hey Mac users, did you know Windows will run on a Mac too? Whether with Apple’s Boot Camp or a virtualization suite, enjoy the benefits of Windows without saying goodbye to your beloved Mac!”
Even if it just made Mac users laugh, at least it’d be a respectable and level-headed approach.
Visited the pages yesterday, so many half-truths and lies of omission it’s not funny.
The second “tweet” that came down the wire was hilarious though–it was a link to instructions on how to access defrag options via command prompt.
Whoa, what!? OSX hasn’t had to defrag for almost 5 years now!
Microsoft should rename that web page “Scare Tactic’s” because that is what it is.
@ Jersey_Trader
Here’s the link http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windows-7/compare/pc-vs-mac.aspx
My favourite is: Mac’s take time to learn. Given the arcaneness of Windows in all its incomprehensible varieties, that’s a monumental piece of hubris that will byte them severely in Ballmer”s overly adequate posterior.
The art of the Apple competitors is to use negative advertising. It is human nature to be sore and jaded when you are loosing. Sort of like the Motorola ads and last year’s Verizon ads.
You are going to lose if you try to compete with Apple directly. Invent something different for a change!
“Whoa, what!? OSX hasn’t had to defrag for almost 5 years now!”
Actually OS X drives do need to be defragmented as they fill up faster and performance suffers greatly when the drive is over 75% filled.
What Apple did was make the most sized files of 2GB and under find a continuous space free on the drive. Larger files and eventually any file will be broken up to fit any space available if space is starting to run out.
What this does is leaves a lot more “holes” and a drive fills up prematurely if not defragmented. Best way is to Clone the whole OS X partition/drive to a external, test it by option booting and then reverse cloning back using something like Carbon Copy Cloner to free up space. (learn before you burn yourself)
What Apple did was realize a performance boost in the short term at the cost of losing large free spaces on the drive. They figured their customers are mostly small time users, so there wasn’t a need for them to have large spaces free on the drive for large files. Anyway if their drive fills up faster, just means they will be in looking for a new computer sooner as they almost charge the cost of a new computer to replace the drive with a larger one. (pricks)
Windows on the other hand chops up files and places them near the front of the drive regardless, leave a large space at the end. This is poor on performance in drives as it has to find all the little pieces.
So in defragging Windows, it places all the little bits together, the free space is always available for large files.
A lot of Windows users simply do not consider getting a Mac. A Windows PC is the “default” choice. Microsoft thrives on this inertia. But a lot more Windows users are considering a Mac because of their positive experience with iPods, iPhones, and iPads. This stupid web site is not for people who already made the switch; it just encourages current Windows users to consider getting a Mac, by making a comparison. And THAT is a big mistake for Microsoft.
@tbsteph
Yes, but the third rule of advertising is: know when to break the rules.
@Wayne2626
Edit:
MS will not stop till they have 50% of the market!