Of course it's his opinion, I didn't omit it. I bolded the part(s) which I found to be particularly bold. Nothing was misread, misstated nor omitted.
Got a tip for us?
Let us know
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.
Microsoft to Respond to Apple's 'Get a Mac' Ads
- Thread starter MacRumors
- Start date
- Sort by reaction score
Of course it's his opinion, I didn't omit it. I bolded the part(s) which I found to be particularly bold. Nothing was misread, misstated nor omitted.
Having seen some of Crispin Porter & Bogusky's work, I have this vision of Steve Balmor wearing a chicken suit and a cheap plaid polyester jacket doing his usual used-car salesman pitch in his usual cackling breaking voice (so perfect for the chicken suit) and maybe wearing a grinning mask of Bill Gates or Richard Nixon.
When it's all over you haunted by the commercial and can't get it out of your mind, even though you have no memory of what was being advertised.
When it's all over you haunted by the commercial and can't get it out of your mind, even though you have no memory of what was being advertised.
What! Not from Apple...uhm...you been living under a rock. Maybe you should got back to the beginning of this thread and read it again.
But again, going by my interpretation of that e-mail, I still don't think he was saying Vista specifically has problems, but rather the desktop metaphor used within Windows has problems, which I do agree with. You can only accomplish so much with a keyboard and mouse, and I'm still not convinced that Microsoft's use of the Start menu is the best way to get work done.I don't believe either of us has proven we're people.
In any case, "people don't like Vista" doesn't mean "ALL people don't like Vista". "People don't like Vista" simply uses a plural that could mean as many as 6.x billion people, or as few as 2 people.
So, how many people is it? There's no way to count, but enough people have a poor view of Vista that MS has a problem on its hands. There should be no disagreement on that point; after all, it's the MS Vista Veep himself pointing it out!
The way I see it, as far as sales and real public perception goes, Windows ME was the only truly bad version. I have found that most of these so-called bloggers haven't actually used Vista, and are only reposting tired minsinformation. I'm not referring to anyone on this board, as the members here are generally more willing to try various software. I'm talking about every random blogger who believes that they are qualified IT professionals.
Of course, I know I won't change anyone's opinion here, and I'm not trying to. I'm just trying to say that I don't believe Vista is anywhere near as bad as people make it out to be, and those who haven't tried it yet out of some sort of FUD should. I think most people will see that for the most part, Vista will not even function all that differently from XP. Most things generally do still work the same way.
Vista since SP1 has been rock solid. I think all of this fervor over the big bad vista is just an example of how successful Apple was with their negative ad campaign.
Not one of the PC, Mac ads discussed the positive features of OS X nor did they mention any significant performance advantage for OS X. All they did was bash and poke fun at PC. Eventually people just assumed that Vista was a bad OS without really using it. Or if they did use it they ran into a software incompatibility with some old software and gave up using it assuming that Vista sucked.
Now after SP 1 Vista is quite good but the bad perception is still out there and being constantly spread by the uninformed.
There were a few commercials that did talk about some features of Leopard, such as Time Machine.
Don't get too comfortable Apple
Microsoft is the master of inspired design. Design inspired by directly copying the good stuff from innovators and leaving out the bad stuff.
But Apple takes risks and introduces new paradigms, so they must must stay 1-2 year ahead of the cloners... just look at the Koreans which are right on the heals of iPhone, LG and Samsung are producing phones that for the most part mimic the iPhone but with more features like video capture...
Microsoft has the money and horsepower to make Windows 7 almost as good as Leopard is.... They have been playing this game since Windows 1.0 was inspired by Macintosh.
I think that the 'get a mac' ad campaign has maybe reached its shelf life. The last couple of ads were a tad derogatory and I don't feel Apple needs to sink to that level. I'm excited to see the next big thing from Apple's amazing advert studios!
Microsoft is the master of inspired design. Design inspired by directly copying the good stuff from innovators and leaving out the bad stuff.
But Apple takes risks and introduces new paradigms, so they must must stay 1-2 year ahead of the cloners... just look at the Koreans which are right on the heals of iPhone, LG and Samsung are producing phones that for the most part mimic the iPhone but with more features like video capture...
Microsoft has the money and horsepower to make Windows 7 almost as good as Leopard is.... They have been playing this game since Windows 1.0 was inspired by Macintosh.
I think that the 'get a mac' ad campaign has maybe reached its shelf life. The last couple of ads were a tad derogatory and I don't feel Apple needs to sink to that level. I'm excited to see the next big thing from Apple's amazing advert studios!
You guys really don't get it, do you? Apple is a competitor in a predominantly Windows world. The only way a product can survive in that kind of environment is by differentiating itself from the predominant product. Apple differentiates itself from Windows by emphasizing the fact that a lot of the typical annoyances with Windows do not exist on Macs. Those Mac/PC ads cut right to the chase, and most importantly, they work. The market share for Macs is increasing.
Apple has tried the more positive approach before and it never worked. That old ad about the guy on the airplane popping open his Powerbook and showing off what he could do in iMovie to the passengers next to him was completely ineffective. Apple's market share didn't budge when those kinds of commercials were the norm.
You know what's funny is that there are lots of other examples of smaller companies doing this same tactic against a bigger competitor and I don't see anyone bitching about that. Does it bother you that Alltel depicts other cell phone providers as bumbling idiots? Do the Samsung Instinct vs. iPhone ads bother you? How about Wendy's taking shots at McDonalds and Burger King in the 90s? Those are all the same thing, a standard marketing move, but I bet you haven't posted anything on the Web about those companies looking like punks.
Oh yeah, but God forbid Apple should do it because that's the end of the world, right there.
[snip]
hmm..... it's a difficult choice
and don't forget the OS
It's not as though there aren't any PC all-in-ones.
Besides, the wires are all behind the desk, hardly an issue.
And how does that apply to the Zune or the XBox 360? Calling MS the "masters of inspired design" is overstating things by quite a bit, unless you consider the red ring of death a bit of inspired design.
There is a difference though. Apple's internal changes will make Snow Leopard run better and faster, especially on multi core machines and machines with dedicated GPUs. Microsoft's internal changes made Vista run slower than XP>
But look the dell has the Logitech Quickcam Pro 9000. There is an ongoing discussion about this very webcam right now, and generally people are saying its better than Apple's isight (Better Resolution) - https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/510990/
I'd take the iMac
EDIT: I forgot to add, I need to get one of those dingys that is sitting on top of the Dell for my power mac so I can operate front row with a remote.... http://www.keyspan.com/products/errf1/.... Well its actually a USB transmitter that plugins behind my computer, but you guys got the gist of it!
I'd take my power mac
I'd take the iMac
EDIT: I forgot to add, I need to get one of those dingys that is sitting on top of the Dell for my power mac so I can operate front row with a remote.... http://www.keyspan.com/products/errf1/.... Well its actually a USB transmitter that plugins behind my computer, but you guys got the gist of it!
I'd take my power mac
Attachments
Are they serious???
"Windows Vista: We've been selling it for a year and a half, but now it actually works!"
Yeah, the fact that Microsoft happily sells unfinished products is really the kind of admission that will inspire the people who have been avoiding Vista to this point because of its bad reputation to finally open their wallets.
~Philly
"Windows Vista: We've been selling it for a year and a half, but now it actually works!"
Yeah, the fact that Microsoft happily sells unfinished products is really the kind of admission that will inspire the people who have been avoiding Vista to this point because of its bad reputation to finally open their wallets.
~Philly
Vista helped me to switch
As someone who has used PCs daily since Windows 3.0 days (phew, giving the age away there <g>), I just wanted to say as much as I admired the Macs I'd seen and played with it was Vista that gave me the final push.
It just doesn't do things the same way as XP (for no good reason). I bought a friend a new laptop. Way faster than his old one. On paper anyway...
Started it up, waited, waited, waited and then Vista finally appeared.
OK, so it might have just been the first time it booted and it needed to setup properly...
No way. EVERY TIME it booted it was so much slower than his old Win2000 Pro laptop. Made it hard to sell him on the idea that the upgrade was worth the $$$.
After some research to make sure the hardware was all WinXP compatible, I did a quick format and installed WinXP. Yippee!!! It now ran like a 2GB, fast Dual Core laptop should run in 2008.
When it came time to upgrade my old PC hardware, I made the jump to an iMac cos I knew it could dual boot into XP. I'm slowly getting across as I ween myself off XP programs.
Actually, the funniest thing was watching WinXP run as a program under MacOS via VMWare.
My old PC is slowly losing it's pride of place. Shame it's got more built-in hard disk space. My vast array of external drives regularly swap between machines (oh how I wish Macs could write to NTFS disks...).
There are some things I'd still like MacOS to offer me:
Window resizing from any side rather than just the bottom right for a start
No one system is going to meet everyone's needs. For me (and a lot of other switchers according to the smiling salesperson at the local Apple store who gets a lot of Vista switchers) it just seems Apple are more on the money than MS.
A faster, more stable OS next time around sounds like a great product refinement. And not waiting 5 years for it is also fantastic...
As someone who has used PCs daily since Windows 3.0 days (phew, giving the age away there <g>), I just wanted to say as much as I admired the Macs I'd seen and played with it was Vista that gave me the final push.
It just doesn't do things the same way as XP (for no good reason). I bought a friend a new laptop. Way faster than his old one. On paper anyway...
Started it up, waited, waited, waited and then Vista finally appeared.
OK, so it might have just been the first time it booted and it needed to setup properly...
No way. EVERY TIME it booted it was so much slower than his old Win2000 Pro laptop. Made it hard to sell him on the idea that the upgrade was worth the $$$.
After some research to make sure the hardware was all WinXP compatible, I did a quick format and installed WinXP. Yippee!!! It now ran like a 2GB, fast Dual Core laptop should run in 2008.
When it came time to upgrade my old PC hardware, I made the jump to an iMac cos I knew it could dual boot into XP. I'm slowly getting across as I ween myself off XP programs.
Actually, the funniest thing was watching WinXP run as a program under MacOS via VMWare.
My old PC is slowly losing it's pride of place. Shame it's got more built-in hard disk space. My vast array of external drives regularly swap between machines (oh how I wish Macs could write to NTFS disks...).
There are some things I'd still like MacOS to offer me:
Window resizing from any side rather than just the bottom right for a start
No one system is going to meet everyone's needs. For me (and a lot of other switchers according to the smiling salesperson at the local Apple store who gets a lot of Vista switchers) it just seems Apple are more on the money than MS.
A faster, more stable OS next time around sounds like a great product refinement. And not waiting 5 years for it is also fantastic...
So people did not blame LCD manufacturers instead of APple when Macbook Pros screwed up?
As someone who has been in the I/T industry for 20 years.... I hope for God's sake that shadow copy is not implemented like shadow copy is on servers and such.... Time machine is a backup, which takes your entire hard drive and backs it up at a given point and time, which you can go back to.
Shadow copy (as one thinks of it, how it has been used for years) is a parallel running hard-drive where if changes are made on the original hard-drive they are copied (at about a 1 minute time delay) to a second hard drive.
the advantage of shadow copy:
1. if you main drive fails, you mount the shadow as your main drive, repair the broken drive and make that the shadow - thus you keep running with little down time and then all your work is applied to the new shadow when it becomes available.
2. You can dismount a shadow to make a backup and then remount. Users can still work during the dismount, backup, and remount.
3. Shadows usually re-sync with the main drive automatically.
The dis-advantage of shadow copy:
1. Undiagnosed problems that cause corruption (the kind where problems happen for days to months, but yet have no symptoms until the system crashes) get copied to the shadow as well, thus you end up with bad shadows and bad backups which can lead to restoring days or months of lost data (i know I been through this number of times).
2. You usually have to have some type of journaling turned on, and journals have to be applied in order to keep the data in sync. Something goes wrong with the main or shadow drive and the journal files end up filling up and cause the system to crash - or worse (if the journals are allowed to grow unrestricted) run the entire drive out of space. I have also seen where journal files get corrupted or applied out of order, now there is a real mess.
3. I have ran into issues where a shadow drive gets in a locked state and causes the entire system to freeze.
to me, Shadow can be a good thing - but if it works the same way as it does on servers; it will serve as little benefit to the average user. Reason, more confusion on how to recover in event of a problem, 2 people will rely on the shadow and not make backups - which can lead them down a bad road.
I have seen even with shadows and backups, sometimes a problem goes on for so long with out symptoms (not really, but I never worked in an I/T shop where people actually look at their event logs until a crash) - that the shadow and backups are bad, so you still have to load the original operating system; break out your application CD's and try to figure out how to recover data.
Good points and bad points - but I can see more people running to their local repair shop. Also with a shadow, depending on how implemented, you cannot just copy a file easily.
I prefer time machine and to back up my own data files regularly to a Cd-RW or other means.
It's not, so the rest of your post makes no sense.
In fact, I'm not sure what you are talking about for "servers" - it sounds more like you are describing asynchronous replication than VSS. VSS works on a single logical drive - you don't need a second disk.
Please look at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volume_Shadow_Copy_Service for clarification.
iWay or the highway. That's creative.
Can't wait to see these ads. Will they bash OS X? For its stability and security?
Well, you know Microsoft... you can't tell where the copying ends and the innovation begins. That being said, since you can't wait to see the ads, here, based on Microsoft past attempts such as X-Box vs PS2/3, Zune vs iPod, Marketplace vs iTunes Music Store, Vista vs OS X, the ad might go... (twinkling music in the background)... I'm a PC (played by Matthew McConaughey) and I'm a Mac (played by that AT&T character in the Alltel ads)... just surmising...
$1300.00 to play a video game!
Wouldn't buying an X-Box be cheaper plus leave one with more money to buy games?
$1300.00 to play a video game!
Wouldn't buying an X-Box be cheaper plus leave one with more money to buy games?
That's what I did. I have a 2.2 MB, and decided the $340 for a 360 was worth it. It's connected to wi-fi, so I can download updates to games and everything. Plus it's pretty sweet player Tiger Woods 07 on a 42 Samsung LCD!
I rarely see the 'I've been an IT professional for xx years' posts from clearly a guy around my age - i.e. in his late 30's <-> mid 50's on a tech forum outside of Apple-based ones or the most simplistic manufacturer-based forums, but they always make you wonder in what capacity they were in. Daily tape-changer maybe? Punch card shuffler? And perhaps it's because somehow they managed to muddle through for xx years being completely incapable of picking up anything that a transition to Macs finally made some sense of it all?
On topic, Microsoft is either going to approach this from the 'new stuff you can do' angle that they epicly failed with 'the wow' campaign, or the 'see, we fixed stuff you didn't even know was wrong in the first place, but now you know because we've told you all about what we weren't doing before' angle.
I wouldn't mind seeing some pithy comebacks to the predictable bunch of BS that is coming out from Cupertino but I doubt what passes for Microsoft's marketing department have the wit to make it happen. Here is kind of hoping, because the number of sheep in the real world that I have the "I'm moving to Mac." "Why?" "Because Vista sucks." "Have you used it? On a new machine?" "God No." conversation with is getting annoying.
Have you gone down the road lately? There is *VERY* little difference between the major manufacturers. Pretty much these days the hardware I see being purchased is done on what it looks like and the customers affinity to the brand name. To claim that end users sit around jerking off over how much they can configure their computer pretty much ignores the reality on mainstreet.
thats exactly what apple is doing. obscure and devalue the word "innovation", copying others and turning around make some fanboys cheering "innovation" w/o even knowing any details behind it.....
At least Microsoft created windows from scratch up.