Players who dominate a market with such confidence don’t create $300 million ad campaigns attacking a “lesser” player (with a tenth of the market share), unless they are directly threatened.

http://dreamlinestudio.com/blog/im-a-pc-ad-defeats-apple/79/

I love when someone criticizes by being nitpicky about irrelevant facts. It only serves to demonstrate that you completely missed the point about the Sandburg poem. First of all, the whole notion that only black people are qualified to comment on the African-American condition is an old, tired one, certainly not to be trotted out in the comments of
a tech blog. Obviously, Kontra felt that Mr. Sandburg’s status as a literary giant and commentator on civil rights (at a time when it was not fashionable to do so) qualified him to participate in this “appropriation.” While I agree that this may be a debatable point, before you felt free to categorize the work of a man of Sandburg’s stature as “condescension and ignorance,” perhaps you should have taken the time to read the biography that Kontra linked to.

So let us consider the actual point which was being made, shall we?. I’ve always felt that the best way to combat insults and stereotypes is to re-claim them and re-establish the context in which they are used. As much as I sometimes detest the manifestations of hip-hop culture, I do believe that their use of the word “nigger” is an example, albeit a crass one, of this sort of linguistic re-positioning. One of my most fervent hopes is that eventually progressives and forward-thinkers will seek to reclaim the term “liberal” from those who have managed to re-define it as some sort of anti-American four-letter word. But I only reveal my political leanings in this forum to site another example of the sort of “appropriation” of which I believe Kontra speaks.

Having said all that, I do feel that what Microsoft is attempting is brilliant. The only problem is, at the end of the day, Vista still sucks, Microsoft still must lug the huge ball-and-chain which is legacy support, and PC manufacturers continue to fight over the razor-thin margins fostered by commodity pricing. And no amount of brand reclamation is going to change any of that.

The other problem is that people know what using Windows is: an exercise in frustration. It’s hard to spin painful daily reality.

“Vista’s slow, it’s fat, my software doesn’t work, I can’t get drivers, the User Access Control’s a pain in the ass and my network grinds to a crawl when I play an mp3! What do you call that?”

“… The Aristocrats!“

This MS ad looks like an inferior knockoff of Apple’s “Crazy Ones” which spotlights top talent, while MS’s spotlights accomplished talent, less than top talent.

Everybody assumes it is a blessing to have a lot of budget. The problem with a high budget is it allows you to avoid real choices, make a mess of it, clean it up (sort of…) and start again. And that over and over again.
Microsoft is – once again – proving that having a large budget can be very counterproductive.