I was really half-kidding when I wrote my “Dear Microsoft” post this afternoon, but even as I inserted my tongue in cheek, I was shaking my head.
Sending out laptops to people to playtest and review is a great idea, but Microsoft missed the boat with this one. First, they put together a laptop that very few “real people” will buy, loaded with the top of the line version of Vista. Then they sent it to geeks.
The majority of Microsoft’s PC customers are not geeks. They’re people like my mom who get their laptop bundled with the latest operating system, who use their computers for photos, email, the Internet, Ebay, and other popular applications, and most importantly, who don’t read geek blogs.
If Microsoft really wanted some buzz, they’d have been better off packaging a mid-range, average user laptop and shipping it out to people who reach that audience. They’d have sent it to knitters, food bloggers, mommy bloggers, teachers, and other folks who have a much wider audience of non-geeky folks. Along with that, they’d have sent it to a few hard-core Mac users willing to test it and write an honest comparison, if not an endorsement.
I consider myself to be in the geek sphere, and if I were contemplating a move to Vista, I would not be looking at an Acer Ferrari laptop. I’d be looking at a nice, fast laptop with a pretty display and good reliability track record. I would search for bloggers who were using Vista and liked it, and see what their specific reasons were for liking it.
After the Windows ME disaster a few years back, I was a very slow XP adopter. I had to overcome my distrust of Microsoft’s buggy releases enough to take the plunge to XP, and I did that after hearing people I trust tell me that it was more stable, more powerful, and was compatible with applications that I used every day. The same is true of Vista. I will give more weight to the person who works the way I do, with a wide variety of applications covering everything from video to spreadsheets. It is likely that my move to Vista will be with the purchase of a new laptop which will likely be a Toshiba or possibly a Dell. That is, if I don’t make the move to a Mac, which is something I’ve been considering when we’re ready for the next upgrade go-round in a year or so.
Back to Microsoft’s current PR efforts, after sending them out with much fanfare and ado, they’re asking for them to be returned or given away, which is an overreaction to the flurry of blog posts over the suggestion that no blogger who received such a machine could possibly give an objective review. What crap. This is the same argument that is made over and over about PayPerPost — that being paid somehow implies a positive reaction.
Memo to MS and their PR Machine: Next time, choose a midrange machine that’s affordable to me, my mom, and the couple down the street who like to IM their grandkids and send digital photos. Hold a lottery or come up with a promotional giveaway with the sole agreement that the person receiving the machine use it for a specified period of time and then write an honest review, whether positive, negative or neutral.
Have enough faith in your product to place it in the hands of the people who will be using and recommending it as a whole, instead of an elite group who write for a much smaller subset of the whole.
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