Wednesday, April 13, 2005

BillG on Dinosaurs

In a BusinessWeek online interview with BillG (Gates: "IBM Isn't Doing That Much"), Gates talks about that wonderful Office 2003 dinosaur marketing campaign:

We have to convince people, to have any revenue at all, that the new version is exciting to them. You don't rent Office, you license it, and then you can just sit on it. We've done a series of ads with these guys with these dinosaur heads on saying, "Hey, we've got Office 97. What's wrong with us? We're so inefficient. Jeez." So that's a fairly helpful message to let people know they should get the latest and greatest.

Geez indeedz. Thanks there, chairman, for summing up the great powerful features of Office 2003 (now with such innovation we just plain can't explain it to you).

8 comments:

Anonymous said...

One thing that I've never liked about Microsoft's advertising is a total lack of any technical information.

When was the last time you saw a list of features in any MS ad?

Anonymous said...

The whole dinosaur idea is pitifull and humiliating. If we wanted to show the old versions of software as dinosaurs - sure, that's cool. But why do we show our own customers as dinosaurs - is beyond me. Our marketing is light years behind.

How about we make Office into a lean and mean package with less bloat and decrease its price to sell in truckloads?

Anonymous said...

The dinosaur campaign is so bad that it makes the "Great Moments in Office" campaign look like oscar material

Anonymous said...

Perhaps they could revive "Bob" or Clippy as a reminder of some other great new technologies that customers don't want to miss out on...

Anonymous said...

I guess I'm odd; I liked the Great Moments in Office just for its plain silliness. And the dinosaur campaign is eye catching. The idea of listing off features in an ad seems to be a sure fire way of getting the viewer to turn the channel or flip the page.

Anonymous said...

u kidding me? who lists 'features' in an ad. Do you see companies like IBM listing the features of Websphere or DB2/390... don't think so.

Anonymous said...

You guys are going to LOVE the new windows ad campaign..

dev null said...

I blogged about that campaign a bit ago. It's insulting to the customer, and idiotic.