Seriously, whoever makes Microsoft’s ads these days really needs to be dumped in the desert…or off the Bay Bridge in a sack. The take-home message of their latest ad campaign is that people look for Macs first, but wind up getting a PC because it’s cheap.
Personally, I would say that the additional software and the promise of an OS that doesn’t pick up viruses like a Tennessee co-ed at a family reunion would be a non-trivial consideration, but the take-home point ought to be this (and it’s something that a lot of people don’t seem to grasp): when times are tight – hell, even when they’re not – price is a lesser consideration than value for money. Sure, you can get last year’s Chevy compact for less money than a Honda Civic, but which one’s going to leave you on the side of the road first?
Coupled with Ballmer’s recent remarks about people not wanting to pay $500 for a label, you rapidly start to get a sense of the take-home message for Microsoft in the Great Recession: Apple is a frivolous branding exercise that people won’t spring for in difficult times.
Well yeah – I’m not going to deny that your typical Mac is way way way cooler than some brick-assed PC laptop that’s tarted up with more stickers than a nine-year-old girl’s Trapper Keeper. But bear in mind that you’re talking about an HP Pavilion laptop that PCMag.com described as “last year’s model” – one that can’t address all the memory installed (for some reason, 32-bit Vista can’t cope with 4 GB of RAM) and which shows 1440×900 on a 17-inch display – which isn’t all that hot a pixel density when you can get 9″ laptops that go 1024×600 and 10″ models that do true 720p HD.
Look, can you get a PC cheaper than a Mac? Hells yeah. You can get a PC laptop for $300 if you like, and it’s an incredibly fast-growing segment. Now you also get a Munchkin-scale keyboard, a processor that would have been a rocket in 2003, and no optical media drive at all, but it can be done. That’s because Apple’s not competing on price, they’re competing on value for money. At the high end of the range, too, the so-called “Apple Tax” has largely ceased to exist; the only place the wild disparity continues to exist is at the low end of the market – and that’s a pool that the Monster of Cupertino simply doesn’t fish in. In the end, the sense you get coming away from the ad is that the Windows machine isn’t the first choice, but it’ll have to do because it’s cheap. Which has more or less been the case for years and years – I just didn’t expect Microsoft to advertise with it.
But here’s the dagger of the whole thing: it doesn’t matter any more. What are the hottest things in high-tech right now? Facebook. Twitter. YouTube. Hulu. What’s the common thread? It doesn’t matter what platform they run on. In fact, the hottest thing in high tech right now is mobility computing, being driven by RIM and Palm and Google – and the iPhone. A common refrain in the Valley is “if your next big thing only runs on a PC, it’s not the next big thing.”
In 1950, NBC launched The Big Show, hosted by Tallulah Bankhead (I would say “pray for us” but Alabama’s greatest daughter is about as far from a saint as you can get without committing actual murder). It was blockbuster programming in every way: top-notch writers, A-list celebrity guests, outstanding music. And it died in two years, having lost a million dollars, because it was a radio show – and a different form of media was taking over. Microsoft is making quite a stand, but when it comes to truly personal computing, I tend to winder whether the sub-$1000 laptop will last against the sub-$200 smartphone.