Microsoft to begin multi-million dollar Vista ad campaign As two-thirds of Pocket-lint readers say just give up

  • rss
  • pdf
  • share
  • save
  • email
  • print
Gallery

9 July 2008 14:15 GMT / By Amy-Mae Elliott

Microsoft is to begin a multi-million dollar advertising campaign to promote the Vista operating system, as an executive admits the current Apple "Get a Mac" adverts have "caused some impact".

However, the most recent Pocket-lint reader poll suggests this could be too little too late for the software giant, with the Vista damage already done.

In our latest survey, we asked you: "Should Microsoft just give up on Vista?" and a whopping two-thirds of you said "yes".

It might interest that 66% to know that Brad Brooks, Microsoft's VP of Windows Vista consumer marketing, confessed publicly this week during a keynote address at Microsoft's annual Worldwide Partner Conference the problems with Vista:

"We broke a lot of things. We know that, and we know it caused you a lot of pain. It got customers thinking, hey, is Windows Vista a generation we want to get invested in?"

In the coming weeks Microsoft will launch a "huge" ad campaign with the tagline "Free the People" to promote the OS, that's said to be worth "hundreds of millions of dollars".

Brooks said of the Apple campaign: "We've got a pretty noisy competitor out there. You know it. I know it. It's caused some impact. We're going to start countering it".

Related links



Comments

  • I have to say Vista is so bad that I started looking at Linux properly for the first time as a desk top. I've already got it running several servers.

    You know what its really 95% of the way there. I built a machine from old parts (Socket A Athlon, SIS chipset, nVidia 6600GT, 1GB DDR 333) and you know what in less than 1 hour I had a nice system up and running with Firefox, uTorrent and VLC playing all my audio/video and browsing all my websites. So I'll keep a Windows system for games but otherwise...

    I actually loaded three flavours, OpenSUSE, Fedora and Ubuntu. I think Ubuntu is more straightforward, but in the end I'll go Fedora because all my servers are Redhat/CentOS so it eliminates a learning curve.

    I have to say I was a bit shocked and the system speed was great for an old crappy system.

    It took about three googles over broken issues, but honestly XP and/or Mediacenter is not any better. You still have to download codecs and fiddle with sleep settings.     Posted by rdhir, United Kingdom
  • Vista is good,Vista is good, Vista is good... Click your heels three times. Feel better ? Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain ! Besides Bill just left, you're on your own now.

    Acer Aspire 5315-2153, $348 Walmart Special,Mandriva Linux 2008.1 Spring Edition. The fist Linux distro where everything worked, on this laptop, the first time !     Posted by dwr50, USA
  • Woked with Windwos vista sice it came out, moved to x64 4 moonths ago and i'm very, very happy. Sure the first 2/3 months had their sahre of app compat and performance problems but thats all gone now ... realy it is... no seriously. Just stop using the crap install taht the OEMs make I mean XP was just as bad with all the crapware installed. Posted by Vista fan, Romania

(Will not be published)

  (Next time sign in to bypass ReCaptcha)

Latest in Software

Latest on Pocket-lint.co.uk

Top products

Top 10 Broadband

Compare 50+
broadband packages

Home Broadband »
Movember

Vodafone Pocket-lint Gadget Awards

Pocket-lint.co.uk poll

Q. In terms of search engines, does voice technology interest you?

Vote YES Vote NO

» LAST TIME
When asked Do you own a netbook? 40% said yes and 60% said no