I liked Microsoft better when they were assholes
37signals.com
37signals.com
They plan the ads, shoot them, and buy the slots months in advance. They're not pulling them like recalled toys from Wal-Mart shelves. If they had wanted more of them, they would have filmed them and purchased the ad slots months ago, and we'd be watching them next week no matter what the critical reaction to the first two.
TV studios don't just say "sure we'll refund your commercial payments because people didn't like your previous ads."
In my previous life as a marketing manager I have seen ad campaigns get pulled. They could have shot different ads as a plan B. The ads we are seeing now might have been intended to follow a longer series of Seinfeld ads but got moved up. Or they might have been intended for smaller markets and were promoted.
It may be the case that Microsoft planned doing just two ads with Jerry all along, but I wouldn't say that not running a third Seinfeld ad is proof of this.
I tried submitting this, but it was marked "Dead" immediately. Nice, it looks like HN knows when enough is enough!
Microsoft is doing something different. And while all different is not cool, all cool is different. It's at least half way there.
So why should I pay attention to this tiny tiny company instead of the big successful one?
Look at google. They started roughly like 37signals (well, not as much self-horn-tooting), but they kept expanding and innovating, and now they are huge. 37signals? They are about the same as when they started!
If they would spend less time talking and more time coming up with new innovative products, then I would start paying attention to them.
It feels to me almost as if it took them 3-4 months to add comments to their todo lists.
Microsoft was fast, agile and they innovated their way to the top. They came up with new products, they copied people and made things better, they released APIs, the offered SDKs. 37signals just writes on their blog.
If the loopt people told me stuff, I'd much rather listen to them than 37signals. 37signals is a slow slow company, they are not a product company, they are all about conferences, talks, books and blogging right now. And as an engineer, I'm sorry, but I don't respect such people, no matter how much money they make.
I want to see products. I want them to hit me with something that makes me say 'wow'. But what do they bring out? Campfire? What the hell is that? It's already there in outlook. There is nothing innovative about painting outlook pretty.
Even twitter is way more innovative than anything 37signals has ever put out.
Microsoft — Revenue: US $44.3 Billion (2006)
IBM — Revenue: $91.4 billion USD +4% FY '05 to '06)
The same thing happened to John D. Rockefeller and Standard Oil. One day he just decided he was tired of being the asshole and said "spend it". He created a foundation to spend his money, there is a funny part in his biography where he was making money so fast his foundation could keep up spending it, causing Rockefeller consternation.
Pity indeed. They're in a tough spot because MS has too many irons in their brand fire. The same company that sells Halo and Zunes sells BizTalk server.
They could probably fix this by breaking the corporate branding into several virtual companies; they could be sliced over 9000 different ways but at least getting the consumer entertainment and devices out into an "edgy" brand would alleviate the pain substantially.
I suspect that this is kind of what they're trying to do with the prefix naming they've done so much of over the last 3-5 years. I think "Microsoft Windows Live Hotmail" is an attempt to put a marque around them without making them look like they are separate companies for antitrust purposes.