Microsoft openly challenges Vmware in new ad campaign

[Josh]

Microsoft vs Apple in the consumer segment is a well known battle and Microsoft has taken charge with it’s I’M A PC campaign which has been successful, unfortunately the same cannot be said about the response by Apple. Anyway, in the corporate sector Microsoft has competition from VMware and here Microsoft has the upper hand, after an open war of words between heads of both companies and Microsoft’s new massive New Efficiency campaign, Microsoft is targeting & challenging VMware openly in a new ad, they’re making no bones about it and are directly calling out VMware as an expensive and not as feature rich solution to Server Virtualization. Point blank stating that their solutions are more cost effective than VMware.

The ad surprised me ‘coz the only the other company I’ve seen so blatantly calling out their competitor’s name is Apple, in their Mac vs PC ads. Here’s the ad:

Source

[Stoic Joker]

Microsoft is puting that it a TV commercial?!?

Why? ...is mom & pop goint to open a server farm after christmas?

I like VPC & Server (and run both) but that's just foolish for TV.

[mwb1100]

Well, clearly it's not aimed at consumers.  However, there are plenty of ads out there for corporate computing solutions (IBM, in particular runs them pretty often).  These ads seem to be most often run on news channels or shows.

I don't think the ad is very effective - it's basically a talking head listing off some of the bullet points from a product marketing sheet. I think MS has a good Enterprise VM story, but I don't think this ad will produce anything beyond what their other marketing will provide.

[superboyac]

Ugh...what's with this trend of using douchebags to promote stuff?

[rgdot]

Ineffective ad in my opinion, but for a corporate buyer perhaps not.
MS has started to make products that are relatively speaking well received and has responded to user needs even. Server 2008, Windows 7 and down to OneNote. Times have changed.