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Comment by MrFoof | Hacker News Reader

They have a video on the main page. The video is a minute long. They have asked for my attention for a minute.

In that minute, they have not told me anything about what the Surface can do for me, and why I should care about it. I'm absolutely baffled by that.

Yes, I might know what it is, and have some idea about what it can do, but if this was a television commercial, I'd bet money that such a campaign would be a quickly forgotten failure.

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Successful companies have learned that a (shockingly) large proportion of consumers form impressions and make decisions on a primarily emotional, rather than rational or practical, basis. That's what this video is designed for. It inaugurates the brand, piques the viewer's interest, and plants the seeds of desire.

Trust me, there will be plenty of time in the coming months for in-depth product reviews, spec comparisons, etc. ad nauseam.

Really, you think that the video succeeds on that level?

I think there's about 10s worth of content there.

Don't pretend you're the world.

Nonsense. You don't need you be the world, you just need to understand it.

Ok, your argument is that this stuff works for the other 95% but it won’t appeal to us hackers. My question to you is, how does Apple make ads that appeal to the rest of the world and something like 75% of the hackers?

When the iPhone first came out, there was no nonsense about the brand and emotion without substance. They made EVERYONE want one.

Microsoft may have chosen not to appeal to us. But Apple has shown that you can do both.

> Ok, your argument is that this stuff works for the other 95% but it won’t appeal to us hackers. My question to you is, how does Apple make ads that appeal to the rest of the world and something like 75% of the hackers?

Asking that question is like asking an Olympic sprinter why he can't be as fast as Usain Bolt, or scolding a successful musician for not selling as many records as Lady Gaga.

Compared to Apple, pretty much every company sucks at marketing. So what? Apple is an extreme outlier in its PR success, owing to a number of unique factors other companies cannot realistically replicate.

How would you answer your own question? Do you think there's a simple solution Microsoft hasn't figured out?

> My question to you is, how does Apple make ads that appeal to the rest of the world and something like 75% of the hackers?

When it comes to successful marketing, companies like Apple literally manage to mess with your mind:

http://www.tuaw.com/2011/05/17/bbc-loving-apple-looks-like-a...

Here is the documentary about this topic. It is fascinating:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b011fjbp

> When the iPhone first came out, there was no nonsense about the brand and emotion without substance. They made EVERYONE want one.

For the iPhone maybe, except for the non-subsidized price, but this was definitely not true for iPod and iPads.

The general consensus was the iPad was a giant iPhone and was going to fail among techies and the tech media.

I said you, not us hackers. Perhaps an appropriate follow-up is, don't pretend you're HN. :P Others have answered about Apple and I don't remember everyone wanting an iPhone when it came out.

Perhaps it's because I haven't received my crystal ball in the mail yet (Soon! /crosses fingers), but people seem to be making absolute judgments of a few hours. Microsoft can have other ads and other ways to promote it; it wasn't 'one ad or die'.

My reaction? Looks neat; let's see what unfolds.

Back at you.

That's called a teaser.

You can say all that, and you might be right.

But the entire site is crap. And I'll admit I'm saying that on a primarily emotional, rather than rational or practical, basis. The images are just straight links, the renderings are poor half-assed CAD drawings, and the colors make it seem like a play-dough ad.

I'm sorry, but this is not professional work. It looks like something I did in high school, in one weekend. As good as the product might be, the site is not good marketing, no matter how you spin it. It's shoddy and lazy. I'm honestly surprised at how poor it is.

can you show us some examples of your work that put this site to shame?

That is an unfair question: one individual cannot be expected to produce sites which compete with an entire international company's output.

It would be a lot more reasonable to ask him to show competitors within a similar industry who have produced a better launch site.

http://www.apple.com/ipad/

It's entirely fair when it's in response to a claim like this: "It looks like something I did in high school, in one weekend."

Personally, I think the site is fine except that I'm getting some pixelation on some of the images (especially the main one, which is scaled to match the screen size). But then, I work for Microsoft.

> I think the site is fine

Oh, I do too. The site is fine, you're right. But for a company with the amount of resources yours has, and for a product launch as important as this is, fine is not good enough. It needs to be exemplary. This isn't—it's just OK.

Lets stay on topic here and not mudsling over your understanding of their development standards.

In other words, see the Verizon Droid ads that pushed android into being a major competitor to iOS..Android didn't do it all by themselves; Verizon put together commercials that evoked emotional responses that brought in the people who wanted the phone that was a robot.

But how much did those adds sell android versus somebody walking into the Verizon store lookinga for a better phone. Can we separate the two as the occured nearly simultaneously?

uhh people don't drop $200 for just a better phone when a replacement regular phone is $0-$50.

Do you really think android was far superior product to Palm Pre? Or maybe the advertising had a bit to do with it...

People weren't really looking for a better phone at the time, though. Everyone knew you had to go to AT&T to get an iPhone, and if they didn't want to change carriers or shell out $$ for the iPhone, they were fine with the cheap feature phone. Cue the Droid advertising campaign, which let people know there was a smartphone on Verizon that did pretty much everything the iPhone did for a bit cheaper. That's pretty much how I saw it go down, but maybe I missed something and it was your average Verizon store rep that upsold it enough to make android a contender.

What I got was mercury, dust/particulates, fractured minerals, and the sense of invasive magnetic fields. I think they were going for power and ... something. Instead I get toxicity, contamination, brittleness.

You're right. Where Apple tends to emphasize family, connectedness, ease of use, utility, and general happiness, Microsoft has chosen to emphasize technology in a harsh, dominant manner that reminds me of the Borg.

The imagery is amazingly negative and oppressive. Especially considering the market they are trying to sell into. The most positive aspect (?) to it is maybe the sense of dominating as opposed to being dominated.

Definitely doesn't make me want to buy one for a child or other family member.

Edit: I could see an image piece like this working as part of an XBox or game machine marketing. But seriously, the thing it makes me think of is a hypothetical Ridely Scott version of The Andromeda Strain.

Microsoft's traditional core market has been the enterprise, to which Borg Marketing is perfectly suited.

There are books worth of insight behind your comment. Why, IT, why u no let us have beauty in our work?

Beauty != profit. If it makes people productive enough to offset the additional purchase cost (and then some), then I'm sure businesses would consider purchasing prettier devices.

Worked for the Droid.

Really surprised by the really clashing tones of their website (Apple, consumer, colors): http://www.microsoft.com/surface/en/us/default.aspx

And that minute long video, which screams Dudes, Droids, and ferrofluids: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dpzu3HM2CIo&feature=playe...

Well, Microsoft's marketing was never really known for consistency, was it? Compare it to this IE9 ad for example: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GFE4rkSaKOY. Imagine an average consumer seeing these ads and then he sees this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=86LxStLXrf4&feature=relmf....

Which one do you think he will understand? To which can he relate more?

(Btw. I don't say iCloud is good. Microsofts Skydrive on win8 (or whatever they're calling their cloud offerings now, I really don't have an overview anymore) seems quite compelling - but it seems to me like they can't really communicate well enough what it does.)

It's a shame the website had a white background, and the video had a black background. The borderless, chromeless video could have looked awesome if it had the same background color as the webpage itself - it would have merged in nicely.

Instead the video stood out as a black box - it looked a little incongrous just 'stuck there' in the middle of the page.

You got more than I did. I got slugged in the face by a demand for a silverlight update and then my browser crashed and I lost all my open tabs. I hate that.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PJxkZWVBs48

Thanks.

Seriously. How hard was that? I have to do a browser plugin upgrade just to watch and ad?! The whole ship is made of fail.

I assume your browser came integrated with adobe flash

Chrome actually does.

no flash here and it (yt link) played fine

edit: no flash or silverlight, and yet both the MS video and the youtube one play fine

For me (chrome on osx) it just started with youtube.

Thank you kindly for the link good sir!

And thank goodness a technologically competent company is hosting the advertising for this new technological product. Such hosting is apparently beyond the technological capabilities of the maker of said product.

Edit: Ok all snark aside, this looks a pretty freaking cool piece of hardware.

Still, the website being off-and-on down on launch day is pretty facepalm.

Still, the website being off-and-on down on launch day is pretty facepalm.

It might actually be a hidden benefit. When I saw the error messages I thought to myself "wow, there is a lot of demand for more news of this..." Therefore, I must know more! (refresh, refresh, refresh... ahh... interesting.)

For all intents and purposes this should never happen on launch day for a groundbreaking product, BUT, in this case the marketing folks at Microsoft should chalk this one up as a success. In a big company like Microsoft, a marketing effort that causes an infrastructure problem is a big win for the marketing guys.

Now, Microsoft has to deliver the product. And the infrastructure guys have to deal with the traffic while the marketing folks are toasting each other with champaign. There aren't any OEM partners at that party though...

Maybe this is just a teaser video. It certainly seems that way. They are revealing the product right now .....

Look at the video they have for the consumer preview of Windows 8 ... it's more in the vein of what you are talking about.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eM5pFkNQ7no&feature=plcp

If General Motors aired a commercial showing a stationary car, and some bouncing objects, my default reaction is not to go to a Chevrolet dealer to ask further questions. My default reaction is probably a non-reaction, which is to quickly forget what I just saw -- or more accurately, what I didn't see.

Come to think of it, perhaps General Motors is using a similar ad agency?: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k_OfzaZcz9Q

Does anyone remember Nissan's initial Infinity commercials? It was just scenery and nature; no car shown at all.

That's a misleading analogy. Microsoft's goal here is not to get you to visit a Microsoft store, since the device won't come out for months anyway. This is the first step in a months-long marketing campaign leading up to launch.

The goal is not to convey information, but rather to form an emotional bond, whether conscious or subconscious.

Definitely a teaser. I keep replaying it just for the music and I actually want one now, even though I don't have a use for a tablet. If anything can move me to buy a gadget I don't need it is a video like that. (especially if they guarantee kickstart on the back making that metallic sound :D)

I thought a similar thing -- too much heavy BGM and no idea what the balls have to do with the tablet itself.

However, as far as giving information about the product, I don't think it was too bad. Features from the video:

* Cover is a keyboard on the back * Cover is removable, and comes in many colors * Kickstand on the back * A little thicker than a USB plug

They are letting Apple define what a tablet does, then adding "ps. it has a keyboard in cool colors".

MSFT should be able to do better and show the kinds of things we can do with this that would get us excited.

Honestly (and I think I represent a certain segment here--the people that really are interested in a tablet but have to deal with Office and other Windows-shackled things) all they need to show is "Hey it's an iPod + Office so you can do your damn work sometimes without always lugging your laptop about". For the people that understand this, that's implied by the Windows logo. The closest I got to settling on an iPod/Android tablet was when OnLive came into existence. Partly, if I could just use OnLive from my linux workstation, I'd almost reach nerdvana and I wouldn't need my netbook for the windows anchorware. But I still sometimes need/enjoy thinking by scribbling with a pen on paper and I want a device for that. Smearing fingers doesn't cut it.

I wonder how large the market is for buyers with this sentiment. I believe that part of the appeal of the iPad (and iOS) is that it's not Windows on a tablet, but instead, a more intuitive computing experience.

One of the executives in my company was using Citrix on his iPad. He kept expecting the Citrix app to be, well, more app like. Instead he was stuck using a Windows application published by our Citrix farm on a touch interface. It wasn't a good experience, and now we're investigating converting a lot of our in house applications to iOS etc.

Now the Windows administrators? They're all over this type of thing, though they would never give up their workstations.

And do you think it makes sense to convert "a lot of our in house applications to iOS" because "one of the executives" hadn't a "good experience"? I hope the investigation will take into account the costs and the benefits (benefits other than making this executive happy with his iPad, i mean)

I'm not criticizing you, this sh*t happens to me every time too... (executives that want toys etc..)

I noticed that as well. Us geeks know what it is but non-geeks are probably like, 'Is that a new iPad?' Contrast with Apple's iPad ads that show 'real' people actually doing things with the device.

and the video is a youtube embed.. you'd think microsoft would bother hosting the video on its own server when this is the centerpiece of the page announcing a completely new product.

Maybe they get a shit ton of impressions on YT, they get to be on the trending videos, first on YT search, etc.

This is the Macbook Pro w/ Retina Display TV ad: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TFIHewtEuJQ&feature=relmf.... It seems like Microsoft is figuring out that heart sells harder than specs.

That MBP ad shows the user editing photos, sending e-mail, editing videos, viewing photos, using swipe gestures, etc. They are not the least alike.

What got me is the narrator. Eerily like Kevin Costner.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nj2A0LybwPA

The Macbook Pro narrator is Peter Coyote, who also narrated Ken Burns' National Parks documentary on PBS.

Thanks. The voice was familiar, but I couldn't identify it.

Remember the original iPod commercials? They were completely devoid of "meaningful content"; it was just people dancing. Consumers went apeshit for it.

That was not the "original iPod commercial" that was an early iTunes-era iPod commercial. The original iPod pitch was "1000 songs in your pocket" which was great copy and got right to the point.

At least there was some convergence with the theme of music and enjoyment. The Microsoft ad is pretty abstract. Reminds me of the Mr. Plow ad: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iTY5EKN6bzM

I watched it and it did tell me one thing: it's a bit like an iPad but it comes with a cover that's also a keyboard.

And that's probably going to be the big selling point. "It's a bit like an iPad, but it comes with a cover that's also a keyboard".

I think the correct play here is for Microsoft to start selling keyboard covers for the iPad.

this guy should be the next CEO of Microsoft

The keyboard is useless without a kickstand.

Hm, I already see one of this annoying Kickstarter emails - "Projects we like: iPad case that is also stand and, ah, keyboard!"

Shut up and take my money ! live.theverge.com/microsoft-live-blog-tablet-announcement/ After you see the details, you can't but meditate.

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