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Comment by markcmyers | Hacker News Reader

As a former advertising executive, I can tell you what the problem is here. The writer and his boss who approved the copy aren't addressing the customer, they're addressing the boss's boss. In a dysfunctional organization like Microsoft, communicating up rather than out is how you get promoted. It's a rare Microsoft employee who moves up the ladder by thinking about the customer.

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Well in fairness, the link points to the Windows blog. The actual marketing page should probably be the link: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/surface/devices/surface-book...

This should be the linked page. A lot more of information than the blog post.

Perhaps if we summon dang it will be changed?

Well that ad's great. It has a footnote giving caveats to the very first sentence!

Thanks for paying attention and pointing this out, a blog post is not a product catalogue!

This might be one of the best explanations I have seen for MS ad copy and marketing in general. Thanks for the insight.

I never actually considered it from an "internal customer" (i.e. the boss) perspective. I just always saw them as painfully out of touch, but it isn't an "out of touch" issue; it is a focus issue.

"they're addressing the boss's boss"

I wonder about that with truck commercials.

I feel like every truck commercial is a sort of "See this is how we want our customers to act!"

The difference is they are demonstrating fantasies or idealizations that much of their customer base have or aspire to themselves. Truck commercials are made that way with a large part of their customer base keenly in mind.

Describing communication in terms of flow and direction is intriguing; it does sound like you have the experience to know what the problem is.

I really appreciated this analysis, thank you.

I just clicked the blgopost and was surprised by its quality even after having read these comments. I expect large companies to display good grammar.

Relatedly, it seems like Microsoft has a million blogs on different domains, it's hard to keep track of what's what.

I don't think that's what is going on here. The guy who wrote this (Panos Panay) is the VP in charge of the entire Surface brand. He is the boss.

It's my understanding that Panos Panay reports to Brad Smith, who reports to Satya Nadella. He is a boss, not the boss.

Also, he's a VP, so he will probably not have written it himself.

Incredibly accurate.

I've suspected this is the case at a LOT of companies. So many marketing and advertising decisions are made this way. As long as they sell enough units it looks like a success, no matter how much potential was thrown away.

This is what made Jobs so great. Most of the criticisms about him are surely correct, but he was a boss who tried to understand the customer, and succeeded at it frequently.

[gone]

“addressing the boss's boss” isn’t referring to writing for high-level decision makers at other organizations, it means writing for people within Microsoft.

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