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September 15, 2008

Recently, Microsoft has embarked on a $300 million advertising campaign to try to convince people that Microsoft is a company whose intentions are good, but is simply misunderstood by most people...

Meanwhile the big public relation agencies are also trying to convince us that Vista IS stable and in its current iteration is working fine. Or is it?

Microsoft went so far as to mask Vista as a new operating system called Mojave, and showed people's reaction on hidden camera. Apparently, some who claimed they wouldn't buy Vista were wowed by it when they saw it in action, but under a different name...

Let's let these people live with Vista (renamed Mojave) for a few weeks, then record their reactions. Something tells us that it wouldn't be very flattering...

In fact, it's gotten so bad that Business Week reported the other day that PC maker Hewlett-Packard "has quietly assembled a group of engineers to develop software that will let customers bypass certain features of Vista."

The article also suggests that HP may even be working on its own operating system!

At the same time, Bill Gates' sharp competitor at Apple just keeps selling products at a furious pace.

AppleInsider reports that a new survey found that, because of the current economic slowdown in the U.S. and elsewhere, while people will still be spending less on electronics in general, they will still continue to buy Apple products.

One element that stands out here is that the survey found that 17 percent of people who bought an iPhone 3G are more likely to buy a Mac computer OS X based on their experience with the phone.

Of cource, that's a large potential market for Apple computers.

As though all that weren't enough, some blogs have started writing in an insightful analysis that Microsoft is failing in a big way to understand youth consumers, a market that's coming under the spell of Apple, which somehow remains hip and everything Microsoft aspires to be, and then Web 2.0 companies such as Facebook and Google.

It's still important to point out that Microsoft continues to be a tremendously successful software company and an industry giant. That said, Microsoft is also clearly a very large corporation, and moves very slowly.

The market has forced the Redmond software behemoth back on its heels where it fails at the forces changing the face of this industry.

Expensive ad campaigns and PR onslaughts aren't the answer. To really recover from its pain, Microsoft needs important and fundamental changes, and for such a large company on the defensive, while it's certainly not impossible, it will be very difficult to achieve.

Time will tell. But some are now saying that time is starting to run out as well, even for the biggest and richest software maker.

Source: Tech Blog.

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