COMMENTARY: Our Two Cents on Microsoft Windows Vista
Issue: Windows Vista Ships – Microsoft Announces $500mm Ad Spend
Commentary by: David Vinjamuri
After over five years, Microsoft is shipping a new operating system, Windows Vista.
Just like the Windows launches of yore, Microsoft is trying to make this a big event (remember the Rolling Stones licensing “Start Me Up” for a Windows launch as their first major sell-out to commercialism).
And this time, Microsoft is upping the ante – literally. AdAge reports that Microsoft will invest an eye-popping $500mm to support the Vista launch.
From a branding perspective, this is an obscene waste of money. Why?
- More frequency isn’t better:
Microsoft will overdeliver advertising to many television watchers causing ad fatigue and risking a significant backlash against the company. - A technology company should spend smarter:
Instead of creating a clever viral or online campaign Microsoft is blowing the conventional media trumpet and essentially proving that it just doesn’t understand the modern consumer or the Internet. - Vista Will Achieve 90% Market Share with $0 Spend Anyway:
Which makes it incredibly difficult to understand why Microsoft is advertising to begin with. This is a distribution play – Microsoft will ship Vista with every PC sold in the world in just a few months. Companies will be forced to migrate to stay in synch with the market.
Taken together, these three elements make us think that Microsoft just doesn’t understand how the terrain has shifted underneath them in the years since Windows 3.0 originally launched. Even this advertising blog knows it’s not about the operating system any more. Vista is an important release for Microsoft simply because Windows has too many security holes and is giving consumers an excuse to migrate to Apple’s OS-X. Instead of a consumer company, the Windows division of Microsoft should think of themselves as an infrastructure company. The best publicity for this division would be to ensure that the new system works seamlessly, securely and that future releases trim the fat of unnecessary features that add complexity and bleed processing power.
March 19th, 2007 at 10:55 am
[...] There were two big pieces of news out of Microsoft this week, both of which will affect the Microsoft brand. The first (which we covered in our most recent post) was the launch of the new operating system Windows Vista. We commented that the $500mm being spent to launch this product is wasteful and will not help Microsoft or Vista. We base this on the absurd spending levels, recent Microsoft campaigns and previous Windows launches. [...]
May 15th, 2007 at 2:41 pm
Your claim that "The best publicity for [Vista] would be to ensure that the new system works seamlessly, securely and that future releases trim the fat of unnecessary features that add complexity and bleed processing power" hits the iron nail right on the irony.
Vista as released is not even stable; discoordinated activity within the OS and its apps causes data loss and system lockup even on Microsoft's own computers! Vista lacks crucial features promised during development, particularly the advanced file system, seeking to charm us instead with a "free" multimedia suite (you pay for it) and tardily restyled look-and-feel.
Security on Vista is like previous Microsoft efforts: a matter of bunging a million tiny corks into a sponge then calling it a boat.
And perhaps the most vital feature Microsoft could include is simply missing — no core-level support for splitting tasks across multiple processors. Only dividing multiple tasks among processors is supported, bad news since in two short years most PCs will have eight cores and Vista would then only be able to assign 12% of the PC's power to any one task, slowing corporate America's spreadsheets and graphics packages to a wheezing standstill.
The feature is missing because Microsoft didn't think they would be releasing Vista so late — it was supposed to have a successor out next year with multiprocessing capability. The successor is nowhere near ready and Microsoft's only answer is to drown out any questions or doubts with wall-to-wall propaganda, right up to the point where they have to admit they suckered us.
By then I expect the fabulous Microsoft cash reserve, currently quoted at twenty-eight billion dollars, will be down to around twenty billion dollars and dropping fast as Microsoft buys its way into more consumer electronics markets, more non-computer-centric enterprises to cushion the blow to its finances as corporate America ceases to buy new Windows licenses.
And Bill and Melinda will be weathering scandals of their own; this habit they have of paying school districts to reorganize schools to their own screwy specifications then leaving them twisting in the wind for further funding is going to blow up in their faces real soon. But that's another rant.