Microsoft Swings Purse At Apple To Tout PC Over Mac

As part of its increasingly feisty public persona, Microsoft has launched a new website lashing back-well, maybe meowing back-at Apple's Mac-versus-PC ad campaign that publicly flayed Windows for a couple of years. <i>Cnet</i>'s Chris Matyszczyk offers a funny take on Microsoft's mushy messages.

Bob Evans, Contributor

August 10, 2010

2 Min Read

As part of its increasingly feisty public persona, Microsoft has launched a new website lashing back-well, maybe meowing back-at Apple's Mac-versus-PC ad campaign that publicly flayed Windows for a couple of years. Cnet's Chris Matyszczyk offers a funny take on Microsoft's mushy messages.Calling Microsoft's new website "slightly more engaging than a leaflet advertising a local beauty parlor that came through my Mom's letter box in 1981," Matyszczyk's post offers these observations:

Microsoft's new creation is a site called "PC versus Mac". Yet if you're looking for a joke or two as you weigh up your options, you will have to search very, very hard. There are no images of bespectacled gray-bearded men in loose Levi's. There are no stray comments about antennas or fanboys.

The site is a very anodyne affair. Garlanded with an image of a presumably perplexed woman who is, perhaps, worrying whether she is cool enough to buy a Mac, it offers straight comparisons of facts and entirely unbiased opinions.

Maybe the site will prove to be hugely successful in conveying straightforward technical information about the power and capabilities of Windows 7-based PCs, and maybe Microsoft created it with absolutely no intent for it to be connected in any way with Apple's long-running TV ads, which stopped running earlier this year.

But Matszczyk thinks it's all a game of cat-and-mouse:

Microsoft took Apple's criticism on the chin and in many areas below that for a very long time. Many PC lovers wished that the company would have fought back. However, now that it does, one does get the impression that this is like a mouse sticking its nose out of a very small hole, still fearing there are large feral cats nearby.

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About the Author(s)

Bob Evans

Contributor

Bob Evans is senior VP, communications, for Oracle Corp. He is a former InformationWeek editor.

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