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Corny spoof video makes fun of Windows 7 Launch Parties

Thu, 2009-09-24 13:56

All ready for your Windows 7 Launch Party? MS is running a campaign to move the "launch party" concept from the streets and stores (where the wistful sound of chirping crickets provided an awkward backdrop to Vista birthday bashes) and into your living room. You'll invite your friends (whom we hope will have the tact to leave their MacBooks at home), and you'll show off Windows 7 features under your choice of festive themes: PhotoPalooza, Media Mania, Setting Up With Ease, or Family Friendly Fun. (Interestingly, Launch House Party planning is handled by Houseparty.com, not MS; the latter seems to mention the parties only on internal forum pages like this one.)

Could be fun, given the right people. Not people like the ones in the send-up video below! It's a great spoof. Check out the painfully stilted dialogue, the scripted jokes, the cheesy mock-reality shaky camera. You gotta love the sarcastic twisting of marketing copy into "natural" conversational banter: "When everyone was settled, I led an overview of my favorite Windows 7 features!" "I showed the guests Windows-dot-com-slash-help, and it's a great site for people to get more information!" "Windows 7 is all about the computer user!"  All hammily acted by a carefully selected, ad agency-approved lineup of gender-, ethnically-, and age-diverse "friends" who are thrilled by Win...

Huh? You say I was misunderstanding this video all along? It's not a spoof, it's the real Windows 7 Launch Party promo for prepping party hosts? Oh my. I can just imagine what Internet wags would do to a helpless piece of meat like this. Which would explain why MS and/or Houseparty.com have wisely disabled commenting on YouTube...

Oh well, in terms of professionalism it fits right in with all recent MS ad campaigns. Enjoy!

Windows 7 an improvement

Mon, 2009-01-12 00:38

From the justly-famous xkcd:

Windows 7

Apple responds to "I'm a PC"

Wed, 2008-12-10 04:08

This is old news already, but it's a follow-up to an earlier post, How not to spend $300 million. That overview of Microsoft's $300 million "marketing rehab" noted the company's "I'm a PC" campaign, which challenges Apple's "I'm a Mac/I'm a PC" ads. While "I'm a PC" doesn't seem an overtly bad marketing idea, observers have questioned the wisdom of playing follower to a competitor's lead – and wags laughed to discover that the "I'm a PC" ads were made with Macs. 

MS could probably live with those complaints. But Apple itself saw "I'm a PC" – and the rest of the "rehab" – as a big, fat softball aching to be smacked out of the park. Without directly pointing to the "I'm a PC" campaign itself, it released new ads that swung for the fences. Here they are, with a little commentary in case you need to explain the ads to Grandma:
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Deja Vista?

Tue, 2008-11-11 13:53
hh_promo_windows7_cropped.gif

[Updated 11/14 with additional quotes]

Are we going to have to write a Windows 7 version of Anything but Speechless: 100 Things People Are Really Saying About Windows Vista? The upcoming successor to Vista – the future OS that all the Windows users are skipping Vista in favor of – should be MS's chance to patch the cracks, squash the bugs, and lance the boils. And with a pre-beta version of Windows 7 spread by MS at its Professional Developers Conference just before Halloween, it looks like the OS may even crawl into the world faster than Vista did.

Yet when InfoWorld gave Windows 7 a through benchmarking and shakedown, the result was the same ill foreboding that accompanied pre-release Vista (and proved all too accurate). Get a load of what InfoWorld says:
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Too cruel?

Mon, 2008-11-03 04:46
Vista grave

Okay, so we know that even the IT industry hates Vista. A new article from enterprise site ChannelWeb tosses more fuel onto that fire. It quotes an Oregon-based tech services company which says,

"I'm very glad I treaded cautiously with recommending Windows Vista, because if I hadn't done so, I would have lost the faith of my clients."

and a Missouri-based system builder which opines,

"Microsoft is eventually going to have to come to terms with the fact that people hate Vista, and it looks like they're starting to do that."

So it goes with the industry folks who actually deal with Vista. But boy, ChannelWeb sure picked an over-the-top cruel title for its article:

Microsoft Partners Kicking Dirt On Vista's Grave

Yeesh. Partners kicking dirt onto your grave – that can't be good, can it?

(Judging from the way MS doesn't even want to mention Vista any more, methinks it's an unmarked grave.)

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