Microsoft's advertising campaign in the US has now moved on from the surreal Jerry Seinfeld and Bill Gates adverts buying shoes and living in an 'ordinary' household (which I quite like but then I was a Seinfeld fan) to ones which seem to take on Apple's "Hello, I'm a Mac" adverts head on.
Although showing the wide use of PCs, and the adverts also feature email addresses for all of the 'real' people shown in them, to me it has missed the point.
Microsoft does not make PCs. It makes operating systems and programs that run on a PC. And increasingly PCs are used to run other operating systems including Linux - and are even being hacked to run Apple's OS X. So they are spending a lot of money advertising something they don't sell. Doh.
It transpires even the adverts were created on Apple Macintosh computers. Read about that here.
The Bill Gates and Jerry Seinfeld adverts (arguably about 'nothing' just like the Seinfeld TV shows):
And some of the original "Hello I'm a Mac" adverts can be seen below. Not that they are to be held up as great advertising, they can be slightly irritating, but they do get their points across. And they are definitely advertising Apple products.
