Through their own efforts, Microsoft means Office, which means corporate. Unsurprisingly, their best consumer success is only tangentially associated with their name. "Microsoft Xbox" sounds like "Accounting Bouncy-house" to most people. There's a little bit of a dissonance when you remember that, yeah, Microsoft made this game system.
Even Windows, which is used by a majority of consumers today, feels like using a work tool at home, rather than something more personal. The way it communicates with you is like a colleague, not a friend. There are features that are the same as equivalent features on other operating systems, sometimes better, sometimes worse. But they are designed to make you "more productive", not to help you. Even when the mechanism is the same, it feels off as a personal device...
So, it's unsurprising that M advertises the Cloud heavily and it just feels like a "team-building" video, whereas A takes advantage of M's "to the cloud" ads building awareness to do a small press push and a brief description in a presentation and it's perceived as the second-coming.
And here's the thing, the "to the cloud" idea as marketing is a great idea! It's funny, and totally memorable -- but the Microsoft brand just kills it dead.
The big problem I have with the "to the cloud" ads is that there's no real call to action, just a vague message that this "cloud" thing seems neat.
It shows you a bunch of features under the vague branding of "Windows Live" and "The Cloud", but it's not really clear what you're supposed to buy or download to get them. Are you supposed to run out and buy one of those touch-screen desktops they're showing off to get the features? Is Windows Live a thing you buy in store? Are these features actually already in Windows 7, and if so, in which apps?
As a techie I'm aware of the distinctions between Windows, Windows Live, the Cloud, and the touch screen computers that feature prominently in these ads, but most people aren't.
Apple is great at clearly getting across the idea that say, iCloud is baked into Lion and iOS 5, so be prepared to get those things to get all the benefits of the iCloud. They give you a simple name to hang all of the benefits they talk about on, a concrete way of obtaining said named item, and a date to expect to go and buy it.
Microsoft, in contrast, can't seem to clearly articulate to people how to get the benefits they are being shown.
Yes. It seems that at some level, the degree of innovation is often similar and the difference between Apple and Microsoft is more a matter of design (which in my opinion is no small factor) and marketing than anything else.
Also "From the makers of Internet Explorer" doesn't exactly have a nice ring to it. Microsoft has a bad track record in exactly the areas that "the cloud" is supposed to fix (security, stability, backups, crash-free, virus-free, maintenance-free, "it just works"). Their PR team has a big job ahead of them.
They're now doing a lot better now -- and have been for a few years, it seems.
People love Windows7 and the virus/security thing is now no longer cool to say. Microsoft Security Essentials (MSE) is widely proclaimed as one of the best security apps available -- recently there was a thread on Reddit asking for 'Must have free apps' and seemingly every second person was suggesting MSE. In regards to maintenance, registry cleaners, defraggers and the like all seem to be fading away from our view. Like with security, speaking of 'BSODs' has dramatically died down and Win7 is not known for stability issues.
Everyone knows of the XBox, but almost no one thinks of it as the 'Microsoft XBox'. The only brand they're helping there is the XBox brand, not the Microsoft brand.
Average families that don't want Office? Any of them with a Mac. iWork is cheaper, integrates better, and is generally easy to use, plus the templates are much nicer. For the 99% of people who use 1% of Office's features, iWork is more than 'good enough', it's 'much better'.
Windows 7 was a success because Vista was junk and XP is ten years old and showing its age. It's a good OS, but people are buying it because XP just isn't good enough anymore and it's Windows 7 or Mac OS X.
Microsoft's brand is hurting because they don't have a cohesive strategy for the things they do. They've launched two separate mobile phone platforms in the last few years; one of which was cancelled almost immediately after launch, and the other, while extremely promising, is floundering in the market so far.
Microsoft needs serious top-down leadership, not middle-outwards leadership, and until they get that, their brand is going to continue to suffer.
Through their own efforts, Microsoft means Office, which means corporate. Unsurprisingly, their best consumer success is only tangentially associated with their name. "Microsoft Xbox" sounds like "Accounting Bouncy-house" to most people. There's a little bit of a dissonance when you remember that, yeah, Microsoft made this game system.
Even Windows, which is used by a majority of consumers today, feels like using a work tool at home, rather than something more personal. The way it communicates with you is like a colleague, not a friend. There are features that are the same as equivalent features on other operating systems, sometimes better, sometimes worse. But they are designed to make you "more productive", not to help you. Even when the mechanism is the same, it feels off as a personal device...
So, it's unsurprising that M advertises the Cloud heavily and it just feels like a "team-building" video, whereas A takes advantage of M's "to the cloud" ads building awareness to do a small press push and a brief description in a presentation and it's perceived as the second-coming.
And here's the thing, the "to the cloud" idea as marketing is a great idea! It's funny, and totally memorable -- but the Microsoft brand just kills it dead.