The purpose of advertising

For the last couple of years Apple has had a series of effective ads which say "I'm a PC and I'm a Mac" - the slightly daft PC guy always is the object of some either subtle or not so subtle jibe. We learned yesterday that Microsoft is planning to strike back.

One of their responses - to the frequent criticism on the vulnerabilities of the Microsoft operating environment will be "Windows Vista has fewer than half the security vulnerabilities of Windows XP," Microsoft said. "It's also 60% less likely to be infected by spyware or malware than Windows XP SP2. And in early 2008, Windows Vista was shown to have 89% fewer vulnerabilities than MacOS X 10.5, making it the most secure Windows release to date."

At an employees conference at Microsoft they said that the company would spend a couple of hundred million dollars on this kind of stuff. Brad Brooks, a Microsoft marketing VP said "You thought the sleeping giant was still sleeping, well we woke it up and it's time to take our message forward. There's a conversation going on in the marketplace today and it's just plain awful. We've got to get back on the front foot." I wonder if the flat earth metaphor actually works. I also wonder with this campaign if Apple needs to spend more of their ad dollars on their campaign.