Selling Windows

Apple began running its now-infamous "I'm a Mac, I'm a PC" ads before Microsoft shipped Windows Vista, but it wasn't until the ads started feeding off of consumer fears and misconceptions about Vista that they really took off. In fact, since then, the Apple ads have been more about the supposed problems with Vista more than any particular Mac features or advantages. It's an interesting form of marketing where you just make fun of the competition while barely mentioning your own products.

The problems with the Apple ads are many. From a Windows perspective, however, three issues stand out. First, they've amplified and exaggerated the problems that Vista users have faced, and have done so for far longer than those problems actually existed. Second, they've proven very popular with viewers, and they've served to reinforce commonly-held, negative, but untrue assumptions about Windows Vista in the eyes of consumers. Sure, Microsoft has sold over 200 million copies of Windows Vista in less than two years. But come on, that's expected. If consumers believe that Vista is a disaster, they could very well be planning to leave the platform for the supposedly greener fields of Mac OS X.

The third and maybe most important problem, however, is that Microsoft has let Apple control the conversation about Windows for far too long. But now, almost two years after Apple first started poking fun at Vista, Microsoft, finally, is fighting back.

Microsoft's tactics are multi-pronged and will evolve over time. But now, about a year after the software giant began an internal push to tell its story, we can look back over what it's done so far. And I think you'll agree that it's been surprisingly effective.

Windows Vista Service Pack 1

Months before Windows Vista first shipped, I had a conversation with a Microsoft executive who asked me how the company could overcome businesses' long-held belief that they had to wait for the Service Pack 1 (SP1) update to an operating system before they'd begin deploying that OS. I conjectured that such a thing would require several Windows releases and many years of trouble-free upgrade experiences, and was an unlikely occurrence.

And so it was with Windows Vista. After attempting for months to convince businesses that it had no plans to even ship an SP1 release, Microsoft relented and announced and then shipped that very release. Since then, the company has been pushing the notion that SP1, somehow, is the release that turned it all around for Vista from a business perspective. The truth, as always, is a lot more nuanced than that.

Think back to when Vista first shipped. Back then, there wasn't much to convince businesses to upgrade. There were general security improvements, of course, and a few specific features like BitLocker, sure. But that was about it. In the year and a half since Vista first shipped, however, a number of business-oriented advances have arrived, including a few upgrades to the Optimized Desktop solution, which provides technologies like the Microsoft Desktop Optimization Pack (MDOP), Application Virtualization 4.5, and, soon, Kidaro, significantly reducing the costs and difficulty of managing and deploying Windows and applications throughout an organization. And thanks to monthly improvements to software and device compatibility, the overall Vista picture, for consumers and businesses alike, has improved dramatically. These improvements are not just part of SP1, In fact, most of them shipped separately from SP1 and before SP1. But by linking the improvements to SP1, Microsoft has adopted the long-held business maxim: Sure, you may have ignored Vista at first. But SP1 is out now, and all is well.

Businesses have bought into this line of thinking, as it turns out. And even the most conservative estimates place Vista deployments in businesses as being on par or ahead of XP adoption at the same time in that OS's life cycle. That's not too shabby when you consider how much the PC ecosystem has evolved over the past decade.

"Windows Vista launched into a different landscape than did XP years earlier," Microsoft corporate vice president Mike Nash told me back in May. "So it has to do a lot more, but the user expectations are the same. We made a lot of hard core architectural changes in Vista, and that hampered compatibility at first, as we said it would. But the ecosystem has worked with us to improve the experience since then."

Taking the fall, even when it's not Windows' fault

There's a saying in the retail world that the customer is always right. This is a wonderful phrase because, in reality, the customer is rarely right. But the customer is, well the customer, and they're at the center of that organization's reason for existing in the first place. So the customer is always right. Even when they're wrong.

So it goes with Windows. When something bad happens to your PC--anything from a grind-to-a-halt Blue Screen of Death (BSOD) crash to a plugged-in device that isn't automatically recognized for some reason--people blame Windows. They blame Microsoft. And they curse Bill Gates and his misbegotten billions as well.

Fair enough. But the truth is, most of the problems that people experience with Windows have nothing to do with Windows per se, or with any code that Microsoft has written. (Don't take that statement the wrong way: Microsoft and Windows certainly have their share of flaws. But the truth is, most of the problems Windows users have really aren't Windows' "fault.")

But it doesn't matter. Microsoft knows that users will blame it and their software for these problems, so they work with the entire PC ecosystem to fix problems. They've also stepped up work to improve the overall Windows experience by ensuring that PCs go out the door with the correct drivers, a simple change that both enhances reliability and boosts performance. Some of this work occurs naturally as hardware makers improve their drivers as a matter of course. But in most cases, a typical user wouldn't even know that such a driver existed. And shouldn't it have shipped with that new PC anyway?

More recently, Microsoft has begun an internal program called Vista Velocity where it works closely with PC makers to ensure that their hardware ships in an optimal state. All the major PC makers are participating in this drive and at least one, Sony, plans to ensure that every single Vista-based PC it sells has gone through program's days-long specialized testing to ensure that they pass muster. Today, numerous benchmark tests tell the true story of Vista performance: It performs as well or better than XP on the same PC. All assuming you have the latest drivers.

Hands on experience at retail

Citing Apple's success with its own retail stores and "stores within a store" locations in Best Buy, Microsoft has decided it needs to become involved with the retail Windows experience for the first time. This is a big step for the software company, which has always relied on its retail and PC maker partners to shoulder this burden. To say that these partners have let them down in a huge way would be an understatement: Anyone who's seen the sad PC displays in a typical electronics retailer or purchased a crapware-laden PC knows the danger of letting someone else sell your product for you. No more.

First, the company created a retail experience center to test its ideas about selling Windows and Windows-based PCs in a retail setting. It shared its finding with major electronics retailers and is working to improve the in-store advertising and placement of Windows products.

Second, Microsoft's been working for several months to put so-called Windows "gurus" in retail locations like Best Buy and Circuit City. (This program is still in a test phase and is not widely rolled out yet, but I have visited one Best Buy location where gurus regularly aid customers.) Gurus are recruited and trained by Microsoft and then sent off to retail stores to interact with customers. They then receive regular video-based training going forward.

Oh, and about those ads

As you're no doubt aware, Microsoft has begun advertising Windows. Some of the ads, like those in the Mojave Experiment series are in-your-face, direct retorts to the lies and exaggerations of the Apple ads. Instead of letting others make decisions for you as Apple wants to do, they let you see a product for yourself and allow you to make your own decisions.

The Seinfeld/Gates ads originally befuddled people a bit, but Microsoft knew going in that in order to start this conversation they were going to have to do it with a sense of whimsy, humor, and humility, and over the two-to-three ads they've shipped so far (depending on how you count), we've seen an ongoing story develop between two of the world's most famous men trying to reach out to regular people, an obvious metaphor for the software giant doing the same.

The more recent "I'm a PC" and "Windows: Life without Walls" ads are, perhaps, the most brilliant. In addition to directly positioning Microsoft's view of the Windows ecosystem, they also draw a nice parallel to the Apple ads, one that compares favorably to the other company's smug and condescending style. In Apple's ads, the PC is a stodgy, overweight, middle-aged guy. But in Microsoft's ads, as in real life, the PC is everyone, people of every age, race, religion, and background imaginable, doing great things every day ... with Windows. Unlike Apple, Microsoft doesn't have to ridicule the competition. It can simply point to all the great things people do with Windows instead. Bravo.

Highlighting the culture

While the TV, print, and online advertising Microsoft has done and will do is, by nature, highly visible, they are not really the primary component of Microsoft's reassertion of the Windows brand. "The ads are just air cover," Microsoft senior vice president Bill Veghte said, noting that the real work of improving the Windows brand has little to do with messaging and everything to do with living up to the ideals that are already well-understood within Microsoft.

The difference, now, is that Microsoft is communicating these ideals to the outside world. "Our goal is to communicate with humor and humility," Microsoft senior product manager Craig Cincotta told me in a recent briefing. "The Seinfeld and Gates ads accomplished that, but they're just an icebreaker. There's so much more to come."

"This isn't about ads," he added. "This is about connecting with people in a different way. Let's have a discussion, and let the chatter occur. Ultimately, we want to just discuss Windows and what it means to our customers."

That notion of culture was driven home this week when Microsoft published its manifesto of what Windows stands for. "Windows is our flagship product, and it's about removing barriers," Microsoft corporate vice president Brad Brooks told me. "Over one billion people use Windows every day. So "life without walls" is a tagline, yes, but it's also a point of view, or philosophy. A rallying cry."

A measured rollout for 7

While Windows Vista is the current version of Windows on the desktop, it's important to note that Microsoft's efforts here aren't confined to Vista. No, this entire campaign is about Windows in general.

That said, there's always a fine line between promoting what's coming in the future and squelching demand for the current product. And with Windows 7, the next major version of Windows that's due in the first half of 2010, Microsoft has been moving slowly and methodically, revealing details in fitfully tiny bursts. This year, we've had a small revelation about multi-touch features in Windows 7 and the company has promised more information next month at its PDC and WinHEC trade shows. Too, Microsoft executives have been blogging about Windows 7 on the company's Web site. They're written a lot of words but revealed precious little about the new system. I suspect that's according to plan.

The future of Windows is on devices and the Web

OK, we all know Windows is a huge success, but consider the following facts and figures. Despite years of expensive advertising, Apple still controls less than 4 percent of the worldwide market for PC sales. Meanwhile, the Windows division at Microsoft generated almost $17 billion in revenues in the company's most recent fiscal year, with profits of more than $13 billion. That means that operating margin for Windows is, get this, a whopping 77 percent. Put another way, the Windows business is a license to print money.

But the future is ever unfolding and today's dominant product could be tomorrow's also-ran. In late 2007, Microsoft banded together a team to explore the future for Windows. Working under this codename FTP168 (for Free The People 24 X 7), this team began exploring how it could communicate all of the things that were possible using Windows on a PC, on the Web, and with a smart phone. The idea is that while the Windows experience today largely occurs on the PC, that won't always be the case. And various product teams at Microsoft are racing to ensure that Windows on the Web, and on mobile devices, is as useful and exciting as its more traditional PC brethren.

In many ways, Microsoft is in a unique position to capitalize on the move towards cloud computing, which will bring with it, at the least, an equal distribution of computing time split between PCs, devices, and the Web. Unlike competitors such as Google or Apple, Microsoft actually has a strong position in all three of these markets. And unlike these other companies, the vast majority of today's computer users are already Microsoft customers. If any company can make the transition to the cloud computing future, it's Microsoft. In fact, this transition is arguably theirs to lose.

Final thoughts

While it's still far too early to say whether Microsoft's many initiatives will stem the tide of undeserved bad publicity for Windows Vista, or open the necessary inroads for the future, it's clear that the company, finally, is serious about at least fighting back. I've had many discussions about this topic with Microsoft over the past few years and I must admit I've been more adept at identifying the problem than trying to solve it. What Microsoft is doing here, however, is quite impressive. And I welcome their attempts at taking control of the discussion about their own product. Apple has had the microphone long enough. It's time to kick those clowns off the stage and let someone less smug, arrogant, and sarcastic tell their story for a while. As Windows user yourself, it's a story I know you want to hear.

--Paul Thurrott
September 18, 2008

Related reading:
Selling Windows

Windows 7 Sells Itself
Selling Windows
Windows: Life Without Walls
I'm A PC
Gates & Seinfeld
The Mojave Experiment ... Live
Behind the Mojave Experiment
Microsoft's Been Swift-Boated
Mission Accomplished: Vista
Is Windows Broken?
Hot or Not? Vista's First 100 Days