Google's logo is plastered on the side of a space rocket. Apple has Nokia worried about its market share, Facebook is adding 10 million users every month. And Microsoft just launched a new mouse. Admittedly, it looks like a very good mouse. It works on almost all surfaces apparently, using "a proprietary, Microsoft-designed complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor (CMOS) chip with advanced algorithms and pixel architecture". At US$100 (Dh367), you would want it to be special.
But calling a new mouse "the next big thing", complete with teaser promotions released weeks in advance, perfectly encapsulates one of Microsoft's biggest problems. Microsoft does a lot of things extremely well. There is nothing that can compare to the applications in Microsoft Office, and particularly not the lacklustre set of imitators that come with the Apple operating system. In being responsible for the mainstream operating software of the business world, Microsoft bears a great - and highly profitable - burden. Keeping the systems secure and up to date with the technology world is a mammoth task that the company handles with great skill.
But in exciting the imagination, there are shoe makers that do a better job. To be sure, Microsoft is doing amazing things. Its Xbox Live gaming system makes online gaming a central part of the console, and it's slick and simple, exactly how web integration into consumer products should be. And its Zune music player, which owns a paltry 2.6 per cent of a market dominated by Apple's iPod, has a set of features that are way ahead of the competition. With the newest version released this week, a Zune owner can wirelessly beam songs to friends, or tag songs they hear on the radio and have them automatically downloaded. The iPod does not even have a radio.
So why does a company that is clearly home to some of the world's best technical minds, which launches innovation after innovation, exist in the public imagination as something about as interesting as a mid-range bank? Google have never spent a cent on advertising, yet loom over the technological world like a mad genius preparing his doomsday machine. Less than eight per cent of the computers in the world are made by Apple, yet the machines are everywhere you look in film and on television.
Despite giant marketing and design budgets, Microsoft struggles to articulate publicly what it is all about. It recently paid $10 million to hire Jerry Seinfeld, whose popularity peaked a decade ago, to be its public face for a new $300m advertising campaign. It would be difficult to imagine a celebrity more stale, predictable and past his prime. The first ad, which can be viewed online, is quirky, casting Bill Gates as the mildly eccentric straight man giving deadpan replies to Seinfeld's incessant chatter. But it does little to build on whatever Microsoft thinks its brand is about, unless the Microsoft brand is supposed to be all about Bill Gates, who has left the company.
In contrast, look at Apple's hugely successful "Get a Mac" advertising campaign. In each spot, the archetypal hipster - hands stuffed nonchalantly in blue jeans, a look of smug detachment on his face - introduces himself against a spotless white background with "Hi, I'm a Mac". "And I'm a PC," replies the stuffy, middle-aged manager in a bland suit to his left. Each spot then takes the Road Runner/Wile E. Coyote path to conclusion, with the Mac character calmly outwitting the PC, or at least demonstrating his lack of smarts.
Neither actor has the star power of Seinfeld, although the PC is played by John Hodgeman, who in real life has an abundance of cool; a former contributor to the hip literary magazine McSweeney's and a regular on Jon Stewart's Daily Show. But the advertisements perfectly extend the Apple brand, from the clean white background that looks like the skin of an iPod or MacBook, to the triumph of the trendy outsider who looks down on those poor corporate drones and their boring PCs. And they probably cost a couple of hundred million dollars less than Microsoft's.
In some ways, Microsoft does not need the cool branding and iconic design of Apple, or the media darling status of Google. Its Windows operating system, Office applications and enterprise business products will continue to print it a steady flow of cash for years to come, whether or not it becomes socially fashionable. Why not embrace the traits its competitors try to poke fun at? Being a big, stable, technical powerhouse whose home turf is the offices and workplaces of the world is not a bad thing.
It is possible that the Seinfeld pick is tacit recognition of this, that its core market is the middle-aged executive whose late night, sitcom-watching college years of the mid-1990s were as countercultural as it gets. Apple's iPod ads, where rollerskating silhouettes with afro haircuts and baggy jeans jive to pulsating funk music in front of technicolour backgrounds, are positively revolutionary by comparison. They may be all well and good for a music player for your teenage daughter, but are you going to trust them with the keys to the company server room?
tgara@thenational.ae
