Institutional Stupidity

The latest news…

The Microsoft Gates/Seinfeld ads have failed. It’s nothing but damage control when Microsoft tells you that they intended to end those ads after two.

The latest Microsoft ads are nothing new: Microsoft’s traditional “embrace and extend/extinguish” tactics, making “good enough” imitations (no flattery, though) and forcing these knock-offs into the market by attachment or by threat, as applied to Marketing instead of just business.

I can only conclude from the mistakes of Microsoft that arrogance has permeated the huge mindless beast of institutional bureaucracy to the point where they believe themselves both dauntless and untouchable. Now, it’s easy on a personal level to think yourself dauntless when what you really are is insecure and with a large blindspot, but when this happens at a corporate-cultural level, well, the solution more and more is razing and starting from the very beginning.

The latest gaffe? It turns out that the replacements (and never forget these new “I’m a PC” ads are at best a Plan B) for Seinfeld/Gates were created on Macs.

Why wouldn’t Microsoft have vetted any creative agencies for this? In the absence of that, why not require some kind of NDA arrangement with those agencies?

Turns out, they may actually have done both!

So how does this come out? Some enterprising person on the intarwebs looked into the metadata of the content (click on the image to see the original flickr):

Here’s the ad itself:

Notice any familiarities to the “Mac/PC” ads? How about any familiarities to the ten-year-old “Crazy Ones” ads from Apple?

The biggest gotcha about this whole thing is the completeness of the also-ran status of Microsoft with respect to Apple: they’ve always “borrowed” Apple-creative materials…but that was in the product arena. These “I’m a PC” ads are a full-on admission that Microsoft lacks creativity even when they outsource it to non-Microsoft companies.

Blatant? Yes. Self-awareness at Microsoft that they are blatant? Not so much, necessarily.

A beast the size of Microsoft need only roll over on anyone else and supplant the original, but just as Gates underestimated the Internet the first time around, Microsoft is ignoring the cultural, historical and archival aspects of the internet. Everyone can recall with a few taps at Yahoo.com or Google.com what went down.

The wreckage and rust of a corporate past keeps getting dragged forward. Microsoft knows that supplanting the original tends to hide and therefore modify history.

Can a beast rollover on itself, supplanting its own original with something new?