Mailbag: Meet the New Ad, Slightly Better than the Old Ad; More

I too have seen the "I'm a PC" commercial (at least the first one). I don't know if it's defensive or not, but it's not persuasive. For one thing, even though I use a PC, I am NOT a PC. Nor am I "PC," although that's a whole other discussion. For another, "PC" is a generic enough term that it's arbitrary to imply that if it's a PC, the thing is automatically a Windows computer. Finally, even though the commercial I saw showed different people using their PCs for different activities, it largely showed someone simply making a claim.

What I'd like to see instead is something along the lines of this: "My PC is me." HP has the tagline "The computer is personal again." Why shouldn't Microsoft make use of something similar? I'd prefer to see a real profile of someone using their PC for interesting activities, rather than just a talking head saying, "I'm a PC, too." Microsoft has partnerships with enough major PC vendors that it could do tie-ins if it wanted. Microsoft just needs to do something different than what it's doing (and has done) so far in its massive ad campaign. I, for one, don't think they're getting their $300 million's worth.
-Dennis

I read your review of the "I'm a PC" commercials and thought it was a bit harsh. The new ad is leaps and bounds better than the Seinfeld ad (mostly because Bill is not in it). Actually, Bill is so goofy that any ad he would be in would ruin it. That said, the new ad has integrity and shows real people doing amazing things with the technology. I am happy Microsoft is finally responding with any kind of ad, actually. It has been tread on by Apple for for too long. I will admit the marketing machine at M$ needs a lot of polish.
-Charles

Really incredibly poor ad. It says nothing. (Are you sure that Apple didn't pay for it?) More and more, it seems like Microsoft is really out of touch.
-Howard

I think the main point of the ads is that while a Mac can SAY how great it is, the fact is that the majority of the world uses a PC!
-Anonymous

The "I'm a PC" ads do a good job of overcoming the myth that only Macs work well. I would like them to go further and say exactly what users like about the PCs. For instance, a Mac ad states that Macs can run Microsoft Office. If I were Microsoft, I would want a PC ad to compare the amount of third-party compatible software and hardware for Macs with PCs. I want to see comparisons of the quantity of qualified support people for Mac vs. the PC.

Given the necessary resources and accepting the limitations of each operating systems, all computers can work well and I am happy for the diversity. Many of my clients only call me after hours of unsuccessful phone OEM support. My PC clients are frustrated by their phone support. My Mac clients accept that phone support didn't help without complaint. Can anyone tell me why the perception is different?
-Earl

I myself find the "I am a PC" commercials confusing and contradictory. If you think about it, the PCs are still a market leader and they perform all the functions that we need them to in one form or another. The commercials are not explaining or saying anything to me other than, "We are all different and we all have our own weaknesses." And what I mean by weakness is the inconsistency of hardware quality. As unique and different as we all are, we are also frail and easy to break if we try to be the cheapest thing out there.

This is exactly why Apple is of such a high quality, including in price. The design is wonderful, performance is amazing, and it is gaining ground because of the opinion that it has a stable OS that is easy to learn and master, and owning one means a sense of longevity.
-Albert

The Gates-Sienfeld ads were STUPID! In fact, they were beyond stupid and rank in stupidity next to the "brilliant minds" who gave us the current financial meltdown.

The current ads are better, but why not try the simple approach? Something like what Sprint did with its CEO talking about how they can personalize the handheld telecommunication box to your needs, rather than spending $300 million on a STUPID Sienfeld ad. Microsoft could've used the money to pay some American developers to test the Chinese-developed Vista OS for bugs and trap doors. That way, MS could've blunted Apple's so-called superiority, as far as system security goes.
-Anonymous

I have to agree with your assessment. How about an ad that directly refutes the so-called "myths"? These ads just make it seem like they are in fact true. It will fail to convince those that need to be.

The "Mojave experiment" is even sillier -- nobody ever said Vista didn't LOOK good.
-Anonymous

Bill thinks Microsoft made another misstep when it decided to buy back $40 billion of its own shares:

I have to disagree. While the stock buyback is an excellent indicator of the strength of Microsoft's balance sheet and fiscal position, it is also an excellent indicator that the company is running out of ideas.

Apparently, they are sitting on a mountain of cash and 1) they can't find (or can't make a deal on) other companies or products worth buying, or 2) they can't think of anything internally in which they can invest. Stock buybacks are, to me, a sign of a company that has lost its vision.
-Bill

In the spirit of Doug's "Speak Out on VMware and Chrome" item, here are a few of you doing just that:

I'm eager for VMware to virtualize more. The best part is the company's focus on quality in both the underlying technology and the management tools. I don't have to be an ESX expert to configure and operate the tools. Assuming VMware maintains this ability to make intuitive, stable products that ease labor, I'm eager to buy, deploy and use them.
-Milton

Chrome is OK, I guess. I remember that when I started using Firefox, I practically gave up IE immediately. With Chrome, it seems that I have to keep reminding myself that I have it, and want to try it out. There is nothing there that excites me about it.
-Jason

I downloaded Chrome a couple weeks ago, and other than a few sites that aren't supporting it too well yet, I've been truly impressed. As an Internet application developer I really get off on the memory usage, multiprocess-oriented tabs and "Inspect element" feature. It's great for analyzing what exactly ASP.NET or any other framework is shipping down to the client. I love the internal task manager with the "Stats for nerds." At work, we're currently doing some final performance testing before we implement into production and would love to be able to use Chrome to help distinguish basic memory usage issues. But alas, my company is much too bureaucratic for useful tools to be downloaded willy-nilly.

My only complaint is that I haven't found add-ins like in Firefox. So from a user perspective, I'd say I still like Firefox better, but as a developer I'm quickly shedding my ties to all other browsers.
-Seth

One reader has a bone to pick with a recent news item that said most botnets come from the U.S.:

According to SecureWorks, 20.6 million attacks originated from U.S. computers and 7.7 million from Chinese computers. But that's meaningless unless you normalize that to the number of users with wideband connections in each country.
-Anonymous

And, since it's on everyone else's mind, Bruce shares his 2 cents on the current economic situation:

Hell yes, the AIG investors should bear the brunt of the fallout! I agree with you wholeheartedly: The investors in those companies should bear the brunt of them failing -- NOT the general public. There needs to be a constitutional amendment against bailouts. Yes, I'm a card carrying Libertarian.
-Bruce

Tune in next week for even more reader letters -- including more of your reviews of Microsoft's new ad campaign. Meanwhile, tell us what you think by commenting below or sending an e-mail to [email protected].

Posted by Doug Barney on September 25, 20080 comments

HPC Is Mainstream

I lamented the fact these high-end OSes and hardware don't mean much to mainstream IT -- that we're missing out on all that power. In fact, most of our cores, especially on the desktop, go unused (I wrote about that problem in this cover story).

Microsoft is one step ahead of me, at least when it comes to HPC 2008, and is now positioning this clustering tool right at IT. Hopefully its hardware partners, such as Cray, will go along for the ride and give us commodity supercomputers that run database, e-mail and even Web apps. This could give the Crays and the SGIs a whole new lease on life.

Posted by Doug Barney on September 25, 20080 comments

Speak Out on VMware and Chrome

The second article is about VMware and its plans for a datacenter operating system, one that promises to turn all your x86 servers, network connections and storage into a single utility. The company claims 70 percent of this functionality is already in place. VMware users and others can contact me at [email protected] and I'll shoot you a bunch of questions.

Both of these articles show how Redmond magazine is driven by readers as much as it is by our writers and editors. So thanks!

Posted by Doug Barney on September 25, 20080 comments

Early Windows 7 Bits Set for Release

My new question: How many folks will go to PDC just to get a free 160GB flash drive?

Meanwhile, the Engineering Windows 7 blog, which was dormant since its inception, is gaining serious steam. Check it out.

Posted by Doug Barney on September 25, 20080 comments

Google Phones Home

From all reports, the Google phone (sold only by T-Mobile) is fully featured. But the real keys are usability, reliability and how well these features work. It took Microsoft a long time to get phones right, and even Apple has had its hiccups (and Apple has been building operating systems since 1976, way before Microsoft got into the game).

But is the real play Android, the OS that drives the Google phone? Could this be the basis of a range of intelligent devices that ultimately replace our laptops and desktops and thin clients? PC World weighs in on this without reaching any major conclusions.

Are you excited about the Google phone? Don't call -- e-mail your answers to me at [email protected].

Posted by Doug Barney on September 25, 20080 comments

Botnets: The U.S. Is the Problem

According to research from SecureWorks, most botnet attacks (those nasties where a hacker uses your computer to attack others) start right here in the good, old USA.

Posted by Doug Barney on September 24, 20080 comments

Mailbag: Microsoft Ads Redux, Cloud Computing, More

The Seinfeld commercials were an abomination (I can't say what I said when I first saw them aired). I'm neither a PC apologist nor a MacManiac; I'm a user of the Wintel consortium products. Those commercials should never have made it off the storyboard, and the agency who created them should be immediately cuffed and tossed in jail for abuse of our sensibilities.
-Benjamin

To heck with the Jerry Seinfeld TV spots. I think that Microsoft is onto something with its new 'I'm a PC' campaign that gives us quick cuts to some pretty cool people, both famous and un-famous, that all claim, "I'm a PC." This is a subtle yet powerful way to steer consumers away from the attitude that PC users are "squares," which was brilliantly depicted in the original Mac spots.

I saw this 'I'm a PC' spot a couple of times over the weekend, and was more impressed the second time I saw it than I was at first look. I think Microsoft is right to have a campaign that, unlike the Seinfeld spots and the "Seinfeld" show itself, is actually about something.
-Ken

On Monday, Doug asked readers whether they've come across any sites that cover cloud computing. Here are a couple:

Here are some sites: Enamoly Elastic Computing and Enterprise Cloud Computing: Build Your Own With Cisco VFrame -- Why Wait?
-Hermine

Here's an interesting cloud blog: The Wisdom of Clouds.
-Anthony

But Ari, for one, isn't buying into this cloud computing business:

I'm surprised that you don't see cloud computing for what it is: a return to the tyranny of the mainframe/dumb-terminal paradigm, and the loss of jobs for hundreds of MCSE/MSCAs. Most, if not all, of our tech support is outsourced, and most, if not all, of our manufacturing is outsourced as well. The United States doesn't really produce anything, with the notable exception that we keep finding new and wondrous ways for us to murder each other. The latest and greatest innovation to come out of the dot-com disaster -- and now cloudware -- is that today, your cab driver is likely to be an MCSE.

Then, there is the issue of downtime. With a server and smart workstation, even a company of 15 employees would not notice a problem on the local network; when setting up the network, you run two servers in parallel topography for redundancy. When properly configured, if one server fails, regardless of the reason, the secondary server automatically switches to the primary server's role and sends a notification to your MCSE and your hardware vendor.

By contrast, a slowdown or drop-off of a cloud system places you, as an employer, in the awful situation where you now have 15 to 20 people drawing their hourly wage while sitting around and making paper airplanes or stringing paper clips together, and you don't have a backup server, so you are stuck behind the eightball and dead in the water (pardon the mixed metaphor). This is exacerbated by the fact that you have no idea how long it will take for the cloud to recondense (besides, with cloud computing, you always pray for rain and that doesn't mix well with electronic components).
-Ari

And Mitchell shares his thoughts on Chrome:

I find it buggy, which is not surprising as a beta. It also tends to be jumpy when scrolling through pictures and graphics on large pages. Also have found problems with Flash and other multimedia. After using it for a day, I went back to IE 7.

Now, IE 8? Many problems, as well. Oh, well -- betas are betas.
-Mitchell

Check in tomorrow for more reader letters! In the meantime, share your thoughts by writing a comment below or sending an e-mail to [email protected].

Posted by Doug Barney on September 24, 20080 comments

Review: I Am a PC

Here's my review: First, the commercials, by taking on Apple's characters, are overly defensive. Last time I checked, Windows was still the market leader. The commercials sound like a high school student who was stood up at the prom. And while they point out that Windows is effective for many, many people, they don't articulate what's so great about it.

The PC revolution has inspired our global economy, led to many technical and creative inventions, changed our very culture, and made the world more unified through nearly ubiquitous communication. Grandparents talk to grandkids a hundred or more miles away, college students e-mail parents...and not always to ask for money!

PCs are also a stunningly great bargain. With so many providers, prices steadily fall, and this commodity hardware is able to run everything from XP to all the major flavors of Linux (note that I left out Mac OS and Vista).

The PC industry has many things to be proud of, none of which I saw in these commercials. Maybe that will be in the next batch.

Are you a PC? Thoughts on these ads welcome at [email protected].

Posted by Doug Barney on September 24, 20080 comments

Microsoft Gains Boston Accent

But do you know where the spreadsheet was invented (by VisiCalc) and then reinvented (by Lotus)? Where the minicomputer was born (remember Data General, Wang and DEC?). Good, old Massachusetts, my home state.

Microsoft bought a bunch of Massachusetts' best brains by buying Groove and Softricity, and got some bright New Hampshire bulbs when it bought Desktop Standard. Now, Microsoft wants to tap into New England research minds by creating a lab in Cambridge, Mass.

The Massachusetts tech economy fell on hard times after 2001. It's already on a comeback, and with Microsoft in our back yard, things should only get better.

Posted by Doug Barney on September 24, 20080 comments

The Highest-Performing Version of Windows Ever

The core product here is Windows High Performance Computing (HPC) Server 2008, which was just completed.

Tools like these have been mostly used by scientists and engineers, and for massive data-mining-type apps. But as the world starts thinking more about cloud computing and IT thinks about building internal clouds, what used to be the domain of the supercomputer intelligentsia could become standard datacenter fare.

Think Windows HPC doesn't have the juice for this kind of computing? Think again. Cray thinks the software is good enough to drive its supercomputers. Not too shabby.

Posted by Doug Barney on September 23, 20080 comments

Microsoft Thinks Its Stock Is a Bargain

Since the tech crash of 2001, the stock has been stuck. Like a rocking chair, it's going nowhere. But Microsoft thinks its own company is a pretty good deal and is buying back $40 billion in shares. That's like buying a Yahoo's worth of stock. And that's on top of the $40 billion buyback already completed.

I'm no Wall Street whiz (and neither, apparently, are they), but this seems like a good long-term move. It acknowledges that Microsoft is now a mature, less volatile stock. It means there's stability and sound financial underpinnings. Oh, how I wish Steve Ballmer and Bill Gates had been running Lehman, AIG and Merrill Lynch!

During the tech crash in 2001, there were no federal bailouts -- and our business came through just fine. Investors (like you and me, I'm sure) who lost money took our lumps and went on. What lessons should we have learned from the tech bubble burst that we can apply to today's Wall Street meltdown? Thoughts welcome at [email protected].

Posted by Doug Barney on September 23, 20080 comments

Microsoft Adds Depth to Security View

There's the model for development itself, which is free. On the paid side, Microsoft has SDL-trained consultants you can hire and a Threat Modeling Tool for sale this November.

As problems with Chrome, VMware, the Mac and Linux have shown, all software can be subject to hacks. It's clear that Microsoft is trying to do something about it.

Speaking of Chrome, are you using it? I'm writing an article about end user experiences and would love to talk to you. Shoot me a note with your thoughts and impressions to me at [email protected].

Posted by Doug Barney on September 22, 20080 comments