Microsoft Switcher Ads: Part 2 761
burgburgburg writes "We all recall Microsoft's last attempt to emulate the Apple Switch ads. Well, it seems they're at it again. MacNN reports that Microsoft has sent out emails to those who have recently registered MS products, looking for candidates for their 'Sensible Solutions' campaign, which will 'highlight computer professionals that have recently converted from Apple Computer products to Microsoft based systems.' Do you qualify? You must be 'a US resident with a minimum of 3 years experience as a computer professional. You must have used an Apple Computer product and a Microsoft based system as part of your work'. So when does it just stop being the sincerest form of flattery and just become utter, pathetic laziness?"
Maybe it just works (Score:5, Interesting)
If Microsoft knows the ads are working for Apple, they'd be stupid not to use them themselves....
apple vs microsoft (Score:3, Interesting)
I actually met a reverse switcher today. (Score:5, Interesting)
Not a chance.... (Score:5, Interesting)
But the adds will never have the pure appeal of the Mac switch adds. "TCO amoritized over the year saved us $$" is not "bleep, bleep, bleep, bleep, gone!"
I have an expensive Mac. It strikes me as slow, sometimes. I get annoyed when software comes out for the PC first. But I'm not giving it up for anything.
Re:Maybe it just works (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:I actually met a reverse switcher today. (Score:2, Interesting)
That's a nifty trick. FUD?
Re:I actually met a reverse switcher today. (Score:5, Interesting)
This is going to change fast, thanks to Safari. Whenever a page looks incorrect or doesn't function in Safari, click the little bug icon in the upper-right corner, and it pops up a dialog where you can send feedback directly to Apple's Safari team. It can optionally include a screenshot of the page.
Trust me, if enough people report problems with the same site, Apple WILL figure out a way to fix it. Safari has already improved dramatically in the beta version from last month to the one released this week.
Anyway, I too have been frustrated by web pages that are optimized for Windows, but thanks to Safari, and also thanks to standards-compliant browsers like Mozilla/Netscape 7, things are finally starting to change.
Re:Talk to Jobs. It's his fault. (Score:2, Interesting)
I wonder when people will realize that Apple is the only tech company in this time actually doing well and not drowning in red ink. Apple will never die as long as it it has its hardcore section of fans.
Hell, they control more market share than Subaru, and they've been around since at least the seventies. No one's saying they're going bankrupt.
Re:Talk to Jobs. It's his fault. (Score:2, Interesting)
I'd like you to provide some examples of why Macs are unsuitable for business.
Best of both worlds (Score:4, Interesting)
My reasons are: PIII)Want games, want to add hardware when I want from just about whatever source I want. The PIII is mostly a frankenstein of parts either bought or traded from friends. Unfortunatly I could not do this with a Mac.
But...
iBook) Want small, only 12.1 inch screen, the thing is tiny, fits in my backpack no prob. My friend's dell required him to buy a new "laptop" backpack. Want tough, magnesium caseing, rubber mounted hard drive, the thing is like a small tank in the laptop world. Want Unix, without all the trouble linux causes in laptops. Yeah I know it is very possible to have a very workable linux laptop, but I don't think it is possible to have a very workable linux laptop that works out the box, and I can send back to the company when the DVD-CDRW drive goes kaput.
Would I own a Mac desktop, at the moment, hell no! They would need to be more competative in both the speed and the price arenas for me to even consider it.
But my point is this, there are people out there who have weighed the differences and made the choice of both. OSX is easy, and fast, and pretty. Win2K (sorry don't know about XP) is where most of my professional experience lays so troubleshooting it easy, and it plays games, and it was hella cheap ($50 OEM version when I bought my HDD).
Re:Of course! (Score:5, Interesting)
Yes. Macs are slow. The ads are meant to sell to user types. As far as crashing goes, yes they used to,or so I hear, but my G4 hasn't crashed in 8 months. Windows sucked just as bad back then too.
You (and this is assuming you have the brains to make an informed, bias free decision), have the right to choose what's right for you. My choice of what's right ranges from Blade servers to Intel/Linux to Onyx's but the Mac is my workstation, and it's staying.
Macs are our friends (Score:0, Interesting)
1. Apple's switcher ads are dumb, as are Microsoft's. In addition, I find them distasteful.
2a. Don't you think that people who 'feel' things about their computer need to get out in the sunshine a bit more?
2b. Are said people really the best kinds to be trumpeting the superiority of your product on TV? Apple's marketing department has successfully sold the idea that our modern world is so devoid of emotion, what with all these techno-gagetry. Its sucking our humanity away! But Apple's not like that. No sir! Why, some of humanity's greatest heroes used Macs. People like Ghandi, and Einstein, even Martin Luther King! And look, here are some regular Joes just like you and me! So buy a Mac, and get some simulated love in your life. Or, if you are poor, a tamagochi.
3. This is wild speculation here, but my sense is that many people who buy Macs as a lifestyle accessory tend to have a bright-eyed, future-looking aspect about them that brings to mind some sort of cyber-squirrel optimistically gazing into a techno-utopia, Powerbook clutched tightly to their chest, only they'd really rather not have to deal with the icky messiness of a regular PC, because the overall lack of cuteness doesn't match their Jetta, lifestyle or vision of techno-Utopia.
Re:I actually met a reverse switcher today. (Score:3, Interesting)
Safari shouldn't have to incorprate work-arounds for IE optimized web pages. The 2 times I've investigated Safari rendering problems, they've turned out to be markup errors.
mac "slowness" (Score:5, Interesting)
I hear you about the performance issue. I've found the G4/MacOSX combo to have "baffling" performance. Many apps and many functions are zippy as can be, but yet there are still a few areas that can be slow. Resizing a window, for example, is pretty slow for all but the most lightweight applications. Apple's iCal calendar app also has a tendancy to chug pretty hard. Yet this very same machine is an absolute video monster. Final Cut Pro runs like a dream, I'm using "just" an 867 MHz machine, yet I couldn't really ask for any faster video editing performance. The app's gui is fast, scrubbing thru frames is fast, applying layers is fast. It's great! True, I don't do much compositing, so my render times are almost instant... but then, neither do most folks. (though I have heard that some folks are finding iMovie 3 to be somewhat slow) I've also found Photoshop to be extremely fast for the images I work with (never larger than 2048x2048). Others have reported zippy compile and run performance of command-line apps, though I haven't tried this out myself.
Perhaps Apple is still in the early stages of tweaking Mac OS X... maybe they're working on the demanding areas first and will eventually touch up the more minor performance issues (window resize, for example).
I don't really blame them (Score:4, Interesting)
So.... what does that leave left to advertise? It must get pretty boring working in Microsofts adverts department. I expect they've got bored of spamming OSDN, that was a good wheeze for a while, but now they have to do something to make the long winter days go past right?
Anyway, it's not like MS are actually threatened by Apple, anybody who runs the numbers can see that. It's just a side show, an entertaining game to try and give the surface appearance that there's actually competition in the markets.
Re:I actually met a reverse switcher today. (Score:3, Interesting)
I am well aware that these pages may not display correctly on all systems.
Unfortuantely, a growing number of web designers are incompetent and/or just plain lazy when it comes to building sites that work with browsers other than IE. There is no excuse for building a site that won't at least provide basic navigation and information with even the simplest of browsers.
I seem to fit your description pretty neatly. But I disagree on the 'no excuse' part. If I help somebody with a simple page that reaches 80% of all Internet users, why does that oblige me to figure out how to make it work for the other 20%?
In can imagine telling a friend this. 'I could make this work for 80% of all users pretty easily. If you want it to work on 100% of systems, then I would have to study some protocols and install some alternative browsers to test it. It would probably take twice as long.' I think most of them would just say 'Don't bother. Go for the quick one, that will reach most people anyway.'
For many providers, the goal is not to reach everyone. The goal is to reach as many as possible at the lowest possible cost per user. And then a quick implementation for the most widely used browser may very well be the best way to go.
Tor
Re:We need a Linux/Open Source switch ad. ;) (Score:2, Interesting)
(with flash and all other wonders)
Re:I actually met a reverse switcher today. (Score:1, Interesting)
> accessible and usable to anything other than
> WIndows IE are demonstrating either major
> ignorance on customer service, a blatant disregard
> for standards, or both.
On the "blatant disregard for standards" point, you could make a pretty good case that IE is *the* standard. Sure, the W3C has published a standard and IE doesn't adhere to it 100%, but the simple fact that most people use IE, several Web design tools support IE very well and other browsers significantly less well, and (probably) most sites are designed to support IE *only* make it a standard by definition. It's just not the same as the W3C standard.
On the "major ignorance on customer service" point, again I beg to differ. My partner and I are just getting an ASP Web app business off the ground now, and we've got our first 2 customers and approx 250 users up and going. The customers have both been briefed that they're using what amounts to early beta code, but they were desperate to sign up and frankly we were desperate for their money.
Now, you'd better believe we're loving these 2 customers to death at this point! Ideally we want to sell off the business to one of our customers (someone bigger than the first two), so customer satisfaction is absolutely top of the list. Piss off one customer and word spreads pretty quickly... My partner and I are on the phone to these guys 1-2 times per day each, and we're meeting with each customer once a week for a couple of hours each. We're taking their suggestions for improvements VERY seriously, and are fixing any problems they're reporting as quickly as we can. Well, that's my job; my partner is the sales/marketing guy and I do the rest...
One of the things we're doing (with the full knowledge of our customers) is logging details of the browser types their users are using. True to form, there seems to be about 5% of the users using Macs, and I suspect they're working from home since neither customer seems to have any Macs onsite.
Now I did all the HTML coding for the site, and I'm definitely not an expert in this area. I tested the code under IE 5.5/Win and Mozilla/Linux, being the two browsers I use regularly, but that was it - the heat was on to get things up and going as quickly as possible, and issues such as scalability and reliability were much more pressing than checking for browser compatibility across lots of browser/OS combinations. It's *extremely* unlikely that things render perfectly under IE 4, Netscape, Mozilla/Windows,
Go back to my previous point - we are loving these customers to DEATH! On 2 occasions, I've raised the question "Are any of your users having trouble with any screens? In particular, those users using Macs?". On the first occasion, the response was a flat "No", and on the second occasion the response was "We checked and a few of them have reported issues, but don't worry about them". Now this is the *customer* telling us not to worry about Mac support, even though their own users are (possibly) having troubles.
I've got all the infrastructure bits in place to support different HTML being sent to different browsers, if necessary; all I need to do is hire the appropriate expert and get him/her to tidy up my amateur design mistakes. This was always the intention. Both customers emphatically DON'T want us to do this; they want us focusing on adding new features, and the Mac users can just suffer in silence till things quieten down a bit.
I've discussed this with my partner, and his response is simple: "The customers are telling us what they want, so just ignore the problem and keep 'em happy". And he's right.
The point is before people go making blanket statements about "ignorance" and "customer service", bear in mind that market forces tend to rule in these issues. For all the recent fuss about MS' site not supporting Opera browsers too well, I bet the net impact to MS is a bit fat zero. In my case, the customers are actively telling me to ignore Mac users, so what do you do?
God, need to remember to check for any of MY users that might be using Opera in the next day or so...
Oh, and can anyone guess why I posted as AC...;->
Re:I actually met a reverse switcher today. (Score:5, Interesting)
Now this would be a killer app for Mozilla-like browsers. Whenever something doesn't look right, You can popup a dialog with a screenshot and some text explaining that the page is "broken" in some way.
Not many people can be bothered to take a screenshot, start a mail-client, write a letter explaining what the problem is, mail the letter and screenshot to "www.broken-site.com".
If 90% of this is already done and all the user had to do was to provide a name and where to send the complaint, I bet we'd see a lot of changes in the web-world.
"Would You FIX the F*CKING page already? We get 500 screenshots a day and it's wrecking havoc in our mailserver"
Problem moved from the person doing the browsing to the person writing bad html.
Re:This is pretty sad (Score:2, Interesting)
Are you the chromosome police? This is an online technical forum, not a dating agency so whatever danamania is or isn't should be of no concern to you whatsoever. Don't you have anything better to do than go around making fun of people who are different? You seem so concerned with other people sexes', maybe you should grow some balls yourself and learn some tolerance.
You obviously have an agenda against her as shown by
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=53823&cid=5
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=53792&ci
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=53792&ci
You are by far the most immature poster I have ever seen on slashdot, and that is saying something.
Please take your prejudices elsewhere.
Fucking troll.
Re:I actually met a reverse switcher today. (Score:2, Interesting)
Wintel users are switching to OS X (Score:2, Interesting)
But with Mac OS X and the new generations of iMac, iBook and PowerBook, the Mac platform suddenly appears perfect for evryone - geeks and novices alike, and amazingly they cost no more than branded Wintel PCs. Take a look at the Apple Store http://store.apple.com/1-800-MY-APPLE/WebObjects/
Before any of the usual idiots whining that they can build these things for less, let me just put you straight - you just can't - not to the same level of style or quality. In any case, Apple is probably the best brands (well, the second best following Google according to a recent survey), and certainly not in the business to compete with any of the DIY box makers.
The real story I am trying to tell is that I have never seen a Mac user switching to Windows in my entire computing life, but have recently persuaded someone to buy an iBook for her first ever computer and witnessed 3 Windows users switching to Mac.
The lady who bought the iBook lives next door, and she just loves playing with her new toy. Being a middle-aged women and having never touched a computer before, she was initially very nervous and constantly worried that she might break something, so I spent about 2 hours explaining the basics, encouraging her to explore the iBook intuitively, and she kept noticing those clever and cute little touches like the bouncing icons, the magnified dock, the pulsing spot when the iBook is asleep, the amber light ring when recharging, etc. And the next time I met her a few days later, she was playing iTunes, burning CDs, listen to Internet radios, playing GNU Chess, and she was fasinated by the voice recognition capability (which I haven't used very much myself).
Among the 3 switchers, my brother-in-law has always been a Windows user until recently, and has 4 Wintel boxes at home. He had been using Eclipse for Java programming on a Sony Vaio bought a year ago which already shows its age - it feels really slow just running Eclipse alone and hardly anything else, typically used two batteries to get a reasonable usage. But recently he put some extra RAM to speed up the Vaio, but unfortunately the thing would get hot really quickly and the 2 batteries couldn't last more than 2 hours. So now he have got an iBook - lighter, prettier, much longer bettery life. And Java is so much better and more on Mac OS X.
The other 2 switcher are all my wife's colleagues: an IT manager and the secretary. When my wife started her new job, she asked for the LCD iMac, but many people including the IT manager and the secretary told her that Macs were no good because no one used them. When the iMac arrived, the IT manager didn't know how to set it up, so my wife (not a computer geek by any stretch of imagination) did it herself (she called me once about the IP address and DNS server). A few weeks later, the secretary quietly bought herself an iMac and an iPod at home, even paid for a
Re:Maybe it just works (Score:1, Interesting)
Of course, to me OS 7-9 was the equivalent of Windows 9X. Crap on a shingle. I hate Apple because I was using Macs when they were shit and a lot of people hate Microsoft because they were using Windows 9X. I would never use an Apple product again because of my past experience and the same goes for those people who hate Microsoft. Personally, I am already dabbling in Linux and support it religously on the server (Slackware 8.1 with Qmail with uptime in months at home) and I figure someday they will come up with a decent GUI (and Gnome and KDE both suck balls).
Re:I actually met a reverse switcher today. (Score:3, Interesting)
Because you shouldn't "figure out" how to make it work on other than ie. You should write standards compliant code and stylesheets period. IF you want to "figure out" how to deform the standard compliant code to get ie to display correctly THEN you should do the same for the other browsers.
You said you use txted to write stuff, good but then you say you test in ie, that's bad. ie is a BROWSER, not a development tool! Want to verify your code? Use HTML Tidy, it's available on the w3c site. ie takes so many shortcuts and exceptions to the standard that it doesn't provide reliable debugging to your code (even between different revisions of the same program).
And finally, you ask why should you waste you precious time to get the thing done correctly? I say for the sake of politeness. You're asking for attention right? Might as well follow the agreed upon procedure and say hello, present yourself, ask for permission, etc... That's in real life, on the web it equates to using standards.
Re:Main reasons to switch from Windows to Mac (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Hi, my name is Bob... (Score:5, Interesting)
probably will stay with XP....Incidently this guys can't figure out os x.
Without fail, the biggest whiners about OS X are those with the most Mac experience (hell, I used to be one of them). The biggest complaint seems to be "The key commands are different." I can't figure out why muscle memory is more important to these folks than rock-solid stability.
Re:But if Linux did, it would be "brilliant"! (Score:2, Interesting)
Also note the fact that a 33Mhz speed bump by Apple makes the front page and garners at least 500 praising posts, while IBM ThinkPads chug along, years ahead, in silence. Or a point release upgrade on their OS. Nobody here can even figure out what the new OSX upgrade DOES, but it's still got 500 posts!
And note that despite being as corporate and restrictive as Microsoft in its darkest heyday, Apple is seen by many Slashdotters as the technological messiah.
Your comment is just stupid. Nobody treats OSS like royalty anymore. Apple is the new royalty. Or haven't you noticed?
The king is dead. Long live the King!
p.s. You DO know about Ellen Feiss, right? Natalie Portman is gone, too.
Re:I did the reverse switch, as did two of my frie (Score:2, Interesting)
What is being ridiculed is Microsoft's efforts which seem to all copy Apple's. It is widely known that MS has copied Apple features over the years and has even been embroiled in litigation with Apple because of that copying. Apple's Switch campaign was notable (not groundbreaking - you'll see why in a second) not because of the core message that you should use a Mac instead of a Windows system, but because it returned to an advertising concept that had largely been abandoned by major companies - customer testimonials.
Think about it. Before Apple's Switch campaign, when is the last time you saw someone on your TV saying, "Hello, I'm a real person and I use this product because it works for me." ?
When the first company returns to a tried and true method that was largely abandoned, the concept is seen as fresh. The second one to try it had better have a radical spin on the concept to truly make it unique else they will be accused of copying. So -- MS looking for real people who have switched from Mac to Windows to tell their stories? I don't see anything unique - I see Apple's campaign in reverse. After one faux pas with a reverse switch campaign, I would think that MS would at least try to come up with something a little original.
Legit marketing by MS (Score:1, Interesting)
If you bash MS on this advertisement, then you should also bach Apple.
Same goes for 'I switched from MS to linux' type testomionals.
Re:Hi, my name is Bob... (Score:3, Interesting)
given that WinXP is about as crappy as OS X is, IMO
Keep in mind that this is release 1 of OS X, and release, well, at least 9 of Windows. I have no doubt that over the next few years OS X will come to display the same polish that the previous MacOS had. I'm in this for the long haul.
I do often find myself reaching for Cmd-N to make a new folder
Heh, me too. Them muscles got lots of memory.
Re:Why I switched: (Score:4, Interesting)
You still get tons of free stuff with MacOS. iTunes, iMovie, iCal, Mail, iPhoto, iSync, Safari, X11, a complete BSD distribution, Project Builder and related development tools, etc. Last time I checked Microsoft charged an awful lot for Visual Studio, not to mention anything equivalent to the rest of that (I don't pretend to be an expert on the exact product offerings and pricing of Microsoft software).
So, if you want to compare prices between similar Macs/PC offerings, please at least quote the correct price and compare similar items.
Our Marketing department swiched... (Score:4, Interesting)
Meanwhile, Marketing's switch to dells and XP has left them miserable. Does that count? Sure was a sensible switch in my mind. Their loss, my gain! In fact I'm typing this in using Safari right now!
dialogs (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Hi, my name is Bob... (Score:3, Interesting)