Note to Microsoft: When The volume is off, we can only guess.

Phallic Much?

I'm beginning to seriously wonder just what the hell it takes to be a marketing executive for Microsoft.

First off, they decide to compete with Apple's quirky "I'm a Mac" ads by having a millionaire and a billionaire (Seinfeld, Gates) roam the middle class countryside like 2 drunken nobles, popping in on 'subjects' to viscously savor their economic superiority over whomever they encounter. This tone deafness couldn't have come at a worse point in our economic history, and the ads were more than frowned upon by the American people.

The pointless and ire-inducing Microsoft ads featuring Jerry Seinfeld and billionaire founder Bill Gates reminding you how much of your time is wasted using the all too fallible operating system have been withdrawn from the airwaves. The ads featured the two in everyday situations that were meant to show that Microsoft is hip and approachable but just managed to come off as lame.

Now they seem to have mimicked their original marketing incompetence by unveiling their mediocre "Bing" search engine with an ad campaign that is either a full frontal assault on people afflicted with Schizophrenia, or simply an ill conceived attempt to squash the benefit of holistic thought.

In its new ads, Microsoft has people scurrying around acting as if the random interconnectivity of search results is some sort of mental illness; when In reality, what those people are doing is demonstrating knowledge. The ad goes so far as to call Bing a "cure" for "search engine overload." Sadly, "SEO" is what the people of Microsoft are mistaking knowledge for these days.

Worst of all, with a tag line like "The world's first ever decision engine," these geniuses decided to imply that because we are all a bunch of committable sickies, we need a search engine that makes decisions for us, which means to me, Microsoft has spent enormous amounts of money creating an automatic George W. Bush machine. Maybe Bing 2.0 will play a "I'm the decider" sound-bite when we click the magnifying glass. One can only hope.

Microsoft has perpetually reflected an absolute tone-deafness with its products and its supporting ads. I haven't even delved into the "Chandler" anomaly; but still... The worst feeling a person can get from an ad is one of inferiority; especially when the products the company is showcasing are so irrelevant that it has to create a bogus 'condition' to prop its irrelevant features on. If only executives got fired these days. We'd probably see some really neat and useful stuff from giants like Microsoft. Sadly, yacht payments seem to prevail.

We know what we're looking for when we use a search engine. To some of us, those little extras we find on the way are golden. If sifting through involved picking up a 50 lb. box and moving it across the room, I could totally see it as a problem. But alas, it doesn't. Therefore, I've fired up my own decision engine and set it for Google.



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