Yesterday's Microsoft marketing bravado is just too funny. So now, 17 months after general availability, Microsoft will promote Windows Vista? Get a life. The big talk and promises came from Microsoft's Worldwide Partner Conference, in Houston, where Brad Brooks fessed up about Vista marketing mistakes and promised there would be response to Apple's "Get a Mac" ads. They say that confession is good for the corporate soul. I say that it's not good enough.Microsoft should never have abandoned the original "Wow" Windows Vista marketing campaign. It brought new meaning to the term "marketing blitz." The campaign flashed by before anybody could blink and say, "Wow." Even if Microsoft executives loathed the ads, better to keep them than have nothing. I remain convinced that the Vista marketing campaign could have been very effective. The TV commercials were aspirational, potentially creating positive feelings about the then-mysterious Windows Vista.
View: The full story @ MS-Watch
It's hard for MS to come up with anything as annoying and effective as they are.
Yeah, Microsoft takes the high road in this case. It makes Apple look weasley. Hubris will be its downfall.
So... any reason they haven't done that yet?
"Products don't sell themselves."
Yet, Vista's sold how many copies with no recent advertising? How can that be?
"There has been nobody out there saying how good is Windows Vista"
Uneducated and apparently....deaf?
"Microsoft marketing has to make people want to buy Windows Vista"
I see someone finally looked up marketing in the dictionary.
"The video opens with two guys standing against a white background, just like Apple's commercials..."
Yeah that's brilliant... copy Apple's formula. So glad you drank all that coffee and "fired up the synapses" so you could come up with an idea as brilliant as "let's use Apple's formula but change some of the words". I sure hope you aren't being paid to write this garbage.
"Everybody knows that there are more Windows PCs than Macs, right?"
And that fact alone should send Vista sales sky-rocketing!! Oh wait...
"I can't imagine Microsoft ever airing such a concept, though."
Yeah, well, they are much smarter than you. So are monkeys.
Vista is too complex for them.
I'd like to see Vista as a niche product that only a handful of people use, like BeOS, not as some mainstream thing like XP.
Vista is too complex for them.
I'd like to see Vista as a niche product that only a handful of people use, like BeOS, not as some mainstream thing like XP.
Why? XP hitting all of the market share was a security disaster. The same thing wouldn't occur with Vista.
In reality, it's exactly what it is right now. Even with this number of license supposedly sold, very few people actually use Vista (in the real world outside of this forum).
You're obviously uneducated.
[/sarcasm]
Yet, Vista's sold how many copies with no recent advertising? How can that be?
Gee, I don't know, maybe Vista is coming with each new computer and Microsoft counts that as a Vista sale?
Zero.
Not a single one.
Altough I will admit, that many come to me because they didn't find what they want in big surface store since they only sell Vista.
I said it many times, Vista needed to be an evolution of XP, not a complete new way of doing thing. No marketing campaign will ever be able to bridge that gap.
Right. That way nothing will ever change for the better when drastic change is needed, and we can just continue to use the same "good enough" thing for now and forever. People got used to XP, and now there's a huge fear of change. These releases should be more often, but in this instance, it was not. Suck it up, move on, and stop whining. There's almost no reason to get XP on a brand new machine.
Unless there is a specific application the user direly needs that is incompatible with Vista, selling them XP is not only ignorant (and likely due to an irrational, fear-driven vendetta), but a disservice. If these people are too scared to change now, what's it going to be like after they use XP for a few more years?
Right. That way nothing will ever change for the better when drastic change is needed, and we can just continue to use the same "good enough" thing for now and forever. People got used to XP, and now there's a huge fear of change. These releases should be more often, but in this instance, it was not. Suck it up, move on, and stop whining. There's almost no reason to get XP on a brand new machine.
Unless there is a specific application the user direly needs that is incompatible with Vista, selling them XP is not only ignorant (and likely due to an irrational, fear-driven vendetta), but a disservice. If these people are too scared to change now, what's it going to be like after they use XP for a few more years?
Actually, selling them XP is, by definition, good customer service. He's giving his customers what they want, not what Microsoft wants them to have.
If Vista is a better choice, he can either recommend it or leave the responsibility with the customer to make an educated choice. Refusing to sell XP because of personal bias, or the bias of others/the community/the market/whatever is bad customer service and he'd deserve to lose business over it.
What I should have said was that pushing XP over Vista is a disservice. The customer should get what the customer wants. However, a salesperson should not suggest that the customer purchase XP rather than Vista on a new PC without a specific need for what is more or less an obsolete OS.
Obsolete ? Says who ?
Someone who walk in my store and want a PC to do Word Processing, Internet surfing and e-mail, doesn't need a big PC and certainly doesn't need Vista. Why should I push them to Vista, they are just going to hate me for it later. And I'll lose the sale anyway because I will have to charge them more than they want to pay. They want to pay the price for the Big Name PC that they saw at Circuit City. They don't care about the 2 gig of ram, or the 250 gig of HD. They just don't want Vista. I don't need to match the hardware, I just need to match the price.
Even better then that, I have 10 to 12 customers every months that bring in a PC with Vista and pay me for an XP license and a reinstall. I've become an expert at it. I'm starting to have a pretty extensive database of drivers. Barely have to search anymore.
Drastic ? What drastic change were needed ?
You see that's the problem, there was no need for such drastic change. Change yes. Evolution doesn't mean same old, same old, with a few tweak. Evolution mean the next step. No need to change the way people were doing thing to make Windows a better product.
Not fear. We live in a society where people are annoyed if you change the way they do thing. They are in a hurry and don't want to spend the time to relearn how to do what they like to do. Call it complacency. Good or bad. That the way it is.
I'll give you just one. Speed. Especially on a entry level machine.
Ignorant ? Vendetta ? Get a grip, my friend ....
I'm just a businessman who want to earn a living and I do what's needed to be done to do so.
Right. That way nothing will ever change for the better...[/quote]
Are you seriously saying Vista was a change for the better? How?
[quote=Skwerl said,#4.1] when drastic change is needed...[/quote]
Perhaps you missed the part where Captain555 was talking about how Windows needed to evolve. You know; Evolution. Are you from a Red State where they teach "Intelegent Design" instead of "Evolution" and thus are having a hard time grasping the concept? It was Vista that was the drastic change we didn't need. Vista was not an evolution, it was a mistake that should have been aborted.
[quote=Skwerl said,#4.1] and we can just continue to use the same "good enough" thing for now and forever.[/quote]
Yes. Yes we can continue to use XP.
And yes, it's good enough. It gets the job done.
Sure, Vista has more bells and whistles and Aero Glass eye candy, but I dare you to name a single compelling feature (besides DirectX 10) that Vista has and XP doesn't. Go on: Name one. That ought to be amusing.
[quote=Skwerl said,#4.1] People got used to XP, and now there's a huge fear of change.[/quote]
Not so much fear of change as loathing of Vista. I was all excited that a new version of Windows was coming out until I saw that there was no compelling reason to shell out 300 buck for it.
[quote=Skwerl said,#4.1]These releases should be more often, but in this instance, it was not.[quote]
You don't know the half of it.
[quote=Skwerl said,#4.1]Suck it up, move on, and stop whining.[/quote]
Who do you think you are, the OS Upgrade Police? I'll move on to a new OS when I'm good and ready to move on to a new OS, and your testosterone-fulled rant to the contrary isn't changing my mind.
[quote=Skwerl said,#4.1]There's almost no reason to get XP on a brand new machine.[/quote]
FAIL! There's plenty of reasons to get XP on a new machine. It has lower system requirements and uses up less system resources to run, it costs less, it's got a UI that everyone is familiar with, it's a very mature OS, there's much better driver support for it compared to Vista, an OH YEAH! It costs less to buy! Why do you think ASUS is shipping the EeePC with XP driver support and NOT Vista driver support?
[quote=Skwerl said,#4.1]Unless there is a specific application the user direly needs that is incompatible with Vista,[/quote]
Thanks for pointing out that there are programs that will run in XP but won't run in Vista. I was going to point it out anyways, but it's always nice when the other guy conceeds the point ahead of time.
[quote=Skwerl said,#4.1] selling them XP is not only ignorant (and likely due to an irrational, fear-driven vendetta), but a disservice.[/quote]
They're coming to me and ASKING me to sell them XP. That's not ignorance, that's RETAILING! People want something and you have it so you sell it to them. Your irrational, arrogance-driven insults aren't helping.
[quote=Skwerl said,#4.1] If these people are too scared to change now, what's it going to be like after they use XP for a few more years?[/quote]
I'll tell you what it's going to be like: It's going to be like me selling them on Windows 7. And stop assuming everybody's scared of Vista.
I'll give you one thing, you're an arrogant son of a sack of hammers. You assume you know what the customer needs and then call anyone who disagrees with you ignorant, stupid, of scared. Here's an idea: Why don't you ASK the customer what he wants and then SELL IT TO HIM! When you arrogance looses him as a customer because you insist on selling him Vista when he wanted XP, don't say I didn't warn you.
EDIT: Sorry about the quotes, I'm not sure what I did wrong there.
*NIX has had UAC for how long now?
Do you see people whining about that? No.
Will *NIX ask you for Root password every time you want to run updates, want to change system settings, want to access/write to system files? Yes.
And yes, it's good enough. It gets the job done.
Sure, Vista has more bells and whistles and Aero Glass eye candy, but I dare you to name a single compelling feature (besides DirectX 10) that Vista has and XP doesn't. Go on: Name one. That ought to be amusing.
But okay, "Besides DirectX 10" there's a few features I enjoy with Vista:
Vista uses all your available system resources to pre-load applications you open often, so that they take less time to load. If you open up a huge application (like say a game) that requires more RAM, Vista will give it all the RAM it needs. Vista shuts down ALL the fancy features once you enter a full-screen application, so in fact it uses LESS resources than XP when you are running a demanding application.
XP also doesn't utilise all available system resources on a modern-day machine.
It costs less because it's worth less.
UI familiarity is a negative point for some, I'll give you that. But considering the UI in Vista is vastly superior once you learn where the moved things are, it will become a benefit in the end. The new sidebar in Vista saves me thousands of clicks every day.
Maturity is hardly always a good point. XP has more security issues than Vista does.
Find me a device created since Vista was released that does not have a Vista driver available. For older devices, I'll give you that point, however newer computers don't come with older devices, now do they?
I'm not even going to dignify the EEE comment with a reply, seriously...
When somebody is stupid enough to code a text editor that requires administrator permissions to start up, it doesn't surprise me that they would code stuff that is based on technology so old support for it was dropped in Vista.
Such software is not something I or anybody else should want on their computer, it's most likely doing the computer more harm than good tbh.
If they didn't want to hear it or had points I could not counter, I would sell them the XP licence.
THAT, in my opinion, is customer service. Blindly selling people outdated stuff because they want it is like intentionally selling somebody 3 year old hardware.
Then these customers would end up at my store, sware at the saleperson that convince them to go for Vista and pay me to upgrade their PC to XP. So I win either way.
Could you please do us the favor of not taking the 3 minutes out of your blow jobbing Steve Jobs day to write article after article filled with such tripe. Thank you for your understanding and you can get back on your knees now
If you find this unfair, perhaps you might want to rant and scream about it some more. This will, of course, require you to put your head up your ass, but I have a feeling that this will not be a problem in your case, Blaxima. You're specially skilled in that area, from what I've seen.
@arilink, I guess its nice to be remembered because I can't even remember the last time I 've posted here but apparently you do, which is kind of creepy. Either that or you were just dying to use that witty response you've been practicing. If I wan't to be banned thats my prerogative so don't make it yours, you'll sound smarter that way
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