So Long Jerry Seinfeld, Bye Bye Bill Gates: Glad To See You Go
Microsoft was wise to say sayonnara to the Seinfeld-Gates TV misadventures. First off the ads weren't funny. Digital Home Blogger Don Reisinger's contention that Microsoft threw in the towel too soon on the Seinfeld Gates ads is more ridiculous than the ads themselves.
Does Reisinger truly believe that those Seinfeld-Gates ads have the power to magically transform the software giant's "poor public image into a positive image" that could somehow erase Vista's PR woes? Get a grip. The only way to fix Vista's PR woes is to fix the product itself. Read my lips. It hasn't worked properly from day one. Driver issues and compatibility issues have made the product in far too many cases simply unusable.
Great advertising or marketing can make a good product into a blockbuster product. But it can not transform a bad product into a great product. What's ironic is that Microsoft was once considered a master marketer that was able to marginalize the far superior Macintosh experience with flat out more aggressive marketing and salesmanship. No more. Microsoft's marketing prowess is a thing of the past. Witness the marketing blunder that was Microsoft's Vista Capable campaign.
Microsoft's best hope for Vista is to fix it once and for all. The company did just that with its security issues that were bringing down the company several years ago. It took its development muscle and put it squarely behind improving the security of all of its products. And it worked.
If you want an idea of just how big a black eye Vista has in the user community ask users themselves? That's what happened at the Midsize Enterprise Summit this week in Texas. The majority of the 340 CIOs polled at the the Midsize Enterprise Summit which is owned by ChannelWeb parent Everything Channel, indicated that they plan to skip Vista altogether. CIOs interviewed at the show said they have encountered a number of driver and software incompability issues when they tested Vista. "We did a test but it did not go well," said Niel Nickolaisen, CIO and director of strategic planning for Headwaters, of South Jordan, Utah. "We had driver compatibility issues, Citrix compatibility issues. It's hard for us to support 1,000 users if things don't go really, really well. We're waiting. We'll see what the [Windows] 7 schedule looks like but we're going to delay as long as possible."
It would be interesting to do the same kind of straw poll at a gathering of consumer PC users. My bet is you'd probably see the same kind of results. Microsoft should come clean and admit that Vista was initially unacceptable. Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer should make a public commitment to improve that Vista user experience and when that development effort is complete -- and only when it is complete -- the software giant should hammer home its success with testimonials from consumers, small and medium businesses and CIOs.