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By now you’ve probably seen the Gates/Seinfeld commercials from Microsoft.  If not, you have no need to worry.  It seems two “episodes” as some have called them are all we’ll see.  The next phase of the $300 million marketing campaign will start soon.  The next step: have a Microsoft engineer that looks a lot like John Hodgeman of the Mac commercials to say “Hello, I’m a PC, and I’ve been made into a stereotype.”  What follows will be celebrities and Microsoft employees, including Bill Gates showing that they, too, are PC users.

It seems like it was only going to be a matter of time before that happened, actually.  There have been a lot of parodies of the “Get A Mac” ads, having Microsoft respond with something at least a bit similar would at least show that Microsoft is aware of Apple.  Not much else has gone right for Microsoft since the release of Vista (especially the “Mojave experiment”); taking the Apple template is at least a safe move. 

According to the New York Times article, Microsoft also plans on having users submitting pictures of themselves to show that they too are PC users, with some being used in advertisements.  It will all work with the marketing concept of “Life without walls.”  Maybe Microsoft is actually planning this all very well.  We’ll have to see how it turns up after all is done.

Of course, there is one telling quote from the article that explains how Microsoft works.  Mich Mathews, senior vice president for marketing at Microsoft is quoted as saying: “The conventional wisdom may be, ‘Hey this is motivated by Apple,’ but there has been a re-engineering of Microsoft.”  If that’s why Vista turned out the way it did, I wouldn’t hope much for the further efforts of Microsoft.  Then again, I did somewhat enjoy the Gates/Seinfeld commercials in an analytical sort of way.  Maybe the re-engineering isn’t too bad.  Or, maybe the re-engineering is to make Microsoft more like Apple.

Read [New York Times]