Microsoft mocks Apple and new iPhones in vids it quickly pulls Microsoft has posted and then pulled several videos in which it mocks Apple's new iPhones. The seven videos first appeared over the weekend on the Windows Phone YouTube channel. All have since been made private, but as will happen online various folks pinched copies of the vids so we can all enjoy them. Here's one titled “ …
That doesn't change the fact that is funny, I personally laughed at both videos. Of course the best humor comes from truth and the fact that Apple is all about image (and are probably running out of gas now that iJobs is no longer there) and that MSFT just loves the bullet points and sys reqs? pretty spot on IMHO.
I don't remember ever seeing any ads for Amiga. Ever. If you can find it on Youtube I'd be curious to see it.
But advertising against Macintosh would have made no sense for Commodore. The Mac and the Amiga were totally different markets. The Amiga was color, about games, and fairly inexpensive. The Mac was B&W, not at all popular for games and expensive. It would be like running ads for a motorcycle against a pickup....totally different markets.
" ...a summary: two Apple employees interview ..."
I could be bothered to watch it. I saw two product developers presenting a summary of their efforts to two different senior staff in various weekly (?) meetings.
Then again, maybe it was a series of therapy sessions where the two developers try to explore the source of their discomfort.
I saw a similar video to yours, but without any therapist session. I definitely saw a different video from ElReg:
In the past, I saw black-clad developers that have to report to Mr. Jobs (seen from the back of the head only). In the present, dress code has slipped to 'casual' as in 'haphazard', and the same idea-less developers are speaking to Mr. Cook (also only seen from the back; for explicitness' sake, he's even addressed at one point as "T.").
MS mocks Apple in these vids to what end? MS has no compelling products in the area of mobile right now. (WinPhone and Surface need a lot of help.) Why even draw attention to their own deficiencies by distastefully poking fun at a mobile leader? And, I'm not trying to tout Apple here, this could easily be an anti-Android ad too. It just seems to smack of how out of touch MS is at their own market standing?
Look carefully.... it's TWO people, one is a bit Jobsian and the other a bit Ivy!
It was funny and why not? MS have been the brunt of so many jokes, why can't Apple? Is it blasphemy?
Samsung did it well on their S3 ads too.
As someone from Britain - piss taking is a national pastime!
Everything else aside, at some point, you've just got to realise you aren't funny so you should stop trying.
My biggest annoyance with Microsoft at the moment is that they are trying to compete with Apple and in doing so have almost completely missed how Apple managed to, overall, grab such a large amount of market share.
In (overly) simplistic terms, Apple got where they are by offering something different - a different philosophy, different direction, different aesthetic. Apple stopped trying to compete on Microsoft's home turf years ago and once they made that decision, they were free to carve out their own patch; a patch they have made so lucrative that MS are now trying to succeed where Apple failed - fighting on opposition ground.
The Windows ecosystem is unsurpassed for most business use. I don't mean stacks of servers in a big Hadoop cluster - I mean PCs on desks. Microsoft are now eroding that by trying to compete with Apple. just look at the backlash over so many of their recent changes.
These kind of ads and marketing decisions are just more of the same - they're still playing catch-up on those "I'm a Mac; I'm a PC" ads
The thing that Apple has always done well is to create an image and follow it. When looking at anything Apple - be it a store or an iPhone or an advertisement - I feel that everything about it has been vetted against a very simple set of design and image principles. Microsoft are so damned piecemeal because they want a slice of every pie.
Correct.
But also, 'unsurpassed' does not necessarily mean 'best', nor even 'best suited'. It can mean: to a greater extent than any other option - the leading option as it were. (Note that that doesn't imply the BEST option either - just the leading one.)
adjective: better or greater than any other
http://oxforddictionaries.com/definition/english/unsurpassed
adjective: as good as or better than any other
http://oxforddictionaries.com/us/definition/american_english/unsurpassed
adjective: better than anyone or anything else
http://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/british/unsurpassed
adjective: having no equal or rival for excellence or desirability
http://www.merriam-webster.com/thesaurus/unsurpassed
There are certainly words which could have better conveyed your meaning if it wasn't "best"...
unremitting? unyielding? unchallenged? common? endemic? prevalent? dominant? ubiquitous? puissant?
. . . but then, what i was trying to get at was not so much 'unsurpassed' as 'not surpassed'. In effect contrasting their business dominance with other areas where Apple have or are looking to surpass Microsoft.
I accept that 'unsurpassed' was too ambiguous a word and lacked clarity but I like it in the comparative sense above, where the word doesn't imply that someone is the undisputed winner, so much as in the lead.
There are likely better words, though perhaps 'still unsurpassed' would have made my meaning more apparent.
I like the Reg and I like you folks; it's nice to be able to simultaneously have a discussion about technology and language with people who have intelligence in both. On an unrelated note, my pain meds have just kicked in.
Found its way onto youtube by accident then I suppose... and would have been swiftly removed even if, in some bizarre reality inversion, it had caused a viral marketing sensation of unprecedented adulation for the evil empire? Pull the other one! It's (yet another) moronically gauche failed propaganda gaffe.
>>>Found its way onto youtube by accident then I suppose...<<<
Probably, yes. I used to work for MS, I've seen some other internal-only films leak out before. Remember the David Brent MS internal vids? They guarded those superjealously, not even available on the intranet, they still managed to leak. This is the kind of thing you might see on one of the screens dotted around the public areas.
Accidental viral really isn't their style. Doubt you'll be convinced, but really very likely to be exactly as I mentioned above.
>Good god... As much as an M$ fan that I am, I hope to god they never decide to pen a script for a movie..
Don't worry, the (overly) MS-controlled Halo movie project was cancelled, and the attached director and producer went on to do District 9 and Elysium (Neill Blomkamp and Peter Jackson), and the writer Alex Garland, to whom MS paid a load of money for a Halo script, did Dredd 3D instead.
A pretty good outcome, methinks!
Who wrote this article? Whoever it was is needs to go bad to school to learn simple English. And the editor/copy editor should seriously reconsider his/her position.
1. Those two people were pitching an idea to DIFFERENT honchos (there was more than one). There was no interview.
2. 'Hilarious' does not have a silent H, so it's 'a hilarious'.
That rather depends upon ones accent.
It's an 'ilarious video, isn't it Private?
Or rather, it's not.
Clearly an internal video that somebody posted onto the general intertubes without thinking about it, then got a telling off and pulled it.
Rather like that infamous Rainbow recording...
No - it's definately 'A Hilarious' and 'A Historic'. 'A Hotel', too. I heard a woman saying 'we're staying in an four-star hotel' the othe day. Doh!
I think the 'An Historic' way of saying it came about because the Americans were trying to suck up to the French once or something - a bit like why they drive on the wrong side of the road.
Or maybe it's an old fashioned Policeman's English thing - adding aitches because it's better than dropping them, to show you're 'heducated'!
In written English you'd never write "riding an horse", or "wearing an hat". Any word that is defined as having an aspirated 'h' at the front (such as 'horse', 'hat', 'hilarious', 'hotel' or 'historic') always takes 'a' rather than 'an' as the article...
Whether or not someone drops 'h's when pronouncing the words is a completely different thing... we add or remove all sorts of stuff when we speak. (For example, a linguistics study I took part in some years ago showed that large numbers of people -- especially when speaking quickly -- say "hambag" rather than "handbag"... and we don't notice. Apart from "The Importance of being Earnest", of course, when it would stand out a bit.)
Well, yes... there are loads of examples of 'an', out there. But if you asked someone to pronounce the word "historic", then almost everyone -- with the exception of Dick van Dyke in "Mary Poppins" -- would include the 'h'. And the general rule still applies. It's fascinating to work out just why some words like 'historic' are treated differently (even when it's harder to say 'an' with the 'h'). Lots of Cockney historians, I guess. :-)
So let me get this right, MS paid actors to do this, camera and sound operatives, a "creative director" no doubt?
Did they hold "back of head" and "black shirt wearing" castings for the middle head?
Someone approved this expenditure, script, and signed off the end result?
FFS,
seriously
FFS.
They are a bunch of children. Mine's better than yours playground immaturity. It beggars belief that a corporation the size of MS would ever think that this was the right way to do business. It would be bad enough if the videos were supposed to be public, but if they were for internal MS viewing only, what message does it send to their employees - I would be embarrassed and mortified. Grow up, MS.
The 'playground' that is PMQ's is pretty childish. If you look at the debates on other topics and the Select committee proceedings I think you will see a lot more sensible debate. I'm willing to give them 30 minutes of playground humor a week.
If you want proper reasoned and well informed debate then go into the House of Lords.
no theatrics of headline grabbing there. The way they go through legislation line by line and think about it makes 'the other place' shameful by comparison. But like all politicians, they get things wrong from time to time.
It's a corporation, it exists to accumulate and conquer.
Ethics goes out of the window when the dollars come calling. To think large corporations behave with ethics or morality is at best naive. I have worked for enough of them to see it first hand. There are very few ethical and moral companies and usually they are very small.
I guess the humour is in the eye of the beholder - not everyone likes Mrs. Brown's Boys but it manages to illicit enough guffaws / revenue.
Of course MS HAVE to be in every market they can, that's how corporations work - if Apple didn't they wouldn't have made an iPad mini, plastic cased "cheap" iPhones, or trying to develop watches. Are we supposed to believe that corporations should be sandboxed? It might often be ill-advised to venture into new areas, but it IS essentially what they and their shareholders want them to do.
It was retarded nonsense. It wasn't even the slightest bit funny!
The "Banned iPhone 5C" video on YouTube is orders of magnitude more amusing than this dross from Microsoft. It was also poor taste that their Tim Cook looked very much like an ill Steve Jobs.
Microsoft, spend more effort making things people want, not making crap like this.
MS should leave it to the professionals:
http://www.theonion.com/articles/apple-unveils-panicked-ideafree-man-at-launch-even,33814/
CUPERTINO, CA—At a highly anticipated press event at its Silicon Valley headquarters Tuesday afternoon, tech giant Apple officially unveiled to the public a panicked and completely idea-free man...
(Though it's not as good as The Onion's 'Macbook Wheel' with 'predictive sentence technology'!)
There are these and I've seen a few previous videos from American TV where Microsoft make reference to the iPhone and even show it in one commercial where someone is trying to take a photo at a Wedding with an iPhone.
I've never understood why anyone would think it's a good idea to show rivals products and refer to them by name in an advert because all you are doing is spending money on airtime and helping promote a rival. Even if the advert is trying to put the Apple product down people will remember that advert for Microsoft where the woman had an iPhone in the church.
Say what you like about Apple, their business practices and their products (especially the crappy WiFi) but they have the best marketing team in the world. Their commercials and marketing can't be beaten except for maybe Stella Artois...
If you can advertise without mentioning the competition by name, all the better. You'll notice that the ads for Chrome, iPhone, and many cars do not mention the competition. Apple did with their "I'm a Mac/I'm a PC" ads because MS had over 90% of the personal computer market, and it was a market which had flattened; the only way to grow was to pull in frustrated MS users.
MS seems to keep sniping at Apple, which shows 1) they aren't dominant, 2) they aren't confident, 3) they don't get it, or 4) some combination thereof.
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