The sleeping giant awakes.

So...I'm sure everyone's seen the cute little ads by Apple in the "I'm a PC" series with Justin Long of movie fame playing the Mac. They're pretty good copy.  Good enough that they've helped seriously propel Mac sales enough to keep the company more than just floating just above insolvency.

Now Apple makes a nice product. They're fairly innocuous and are just fine for the home user who doesn't want to have to use their brain to compute, doesn't need to use the same productivity software most of the rest of the world uses and doesn't have a need for much networking. In the business world, however, Macs are pretty much a disaster outside of small design shops. They suck at networking in large environments...they don't interact well with the Active Directory used by Windows, or other LDAP based directory services that between the two of them are in use by almost every medium to large scale business. They require a different infrastructure for software and patch delivery and different anti-virus, as well as proprietary networking equipment for wireless connectivity. And they don't use business aps well unless you use parallels, and even then they can be iffy. Apple doesn't make a server worth a damn, and doesn't have a directory service so you can't make an all Apple shop to keep cost and complexity down.

All in all, they're a nice toy that can emulate a PC, but don't really do what a PC does.

Which is kind of the annoying thing about the ads by Apple, especially for an IT profession like myself who works with tens of thousands of computers on a daily basis. Because they imply that the Mac does replace the PC, and infact they infer that the PC doesn't work as well as the apple. That it's just a substandard device...which is patently ridiculous.

In any case...the cute little ads have run unopposed for a couple of years now. But that is about to change.

Microsoft has decided it's time to "tear down the walls for a better view", as they put it...and they've devised a series of their own cute ads to highlight the PC and Microsoft's products. There have been a couple of new ones with Jerry Seinfeld and Bill Gates recently...and now there's a new one which will be out this week.

Check it out...

Not bad for the not so hip kids from Redmond.

peace,
Aielman