DigitalSandbox

One of the major complaints about Apple’s marketing has always been a reluctance to actually advertise the Mac. You can’t walk down the street without seeing an iPod+iTunes ad, let alone watch TV without a commercial for the ubiquitous music player. But you’ll be hard-pressed to find a Mac ad anywhere.

This has constantly been a sore spot for us Mac-fans. We believe we are using superior technology and would hope that the company responsible for it would think so too. So the lack of advertising for the Mac has been a sore spot for us. Especially, when Dell is out there advertising the heck out of their crap stuff.

Well, the day has come. Apple will be running ads that not only promote the Mac, they poke fun (some might say trash) the PC. The series of ads (you can watch them here) features 2 actors — one playing a PC and another playing the Mac — talking about their differences and similarities. They talk about viruses, and the lack of viruses for OS X. The tendency of PCs to freeze, and other differences. Of course, the Mac comes out ahead in each instance. They are actually quite funny.

Apple’s strategy seems to be to generate interest in the Mac and hopefully people will go to an Apple store (or other Apple retailer) and check it out. I used to think that they should show some clips of the interface and generate more interest that way. Of course, the issue with that is that you can’t really get an idea of how the Mac is different and better than a PC until you have used it for a little longer than a few seconds.

Most every story that I have seen about those that have made the switch follows this pattern.

• They buy their shiny new Mac with some excitement and some reservations about how it will work.
• They instantly find things they love about it (usually the way it looks) and then wonder why it doesn’t do X like Windows does.
• They start to complain a little about the differences for a about a week.
• Then they start to get used to the way the Mac does things. After about three weeks, they start to complain that the PC at work does things so differently from their Mac at home and why can’t Windows work better.

I have seen that scenario play out over and over again. If you don’t believe me you should read about any of the “Hey, new switcher here” threads over on the MacRumors forums.

I hope that this series of ads works for Apple. Apple’s mindshare has risen sharply over the last few years as the iPod has become a huge success. Microsoft’s continuing struggles with Vista and the successful rollout of Intel Macs helps a lot. All these event culminate into an opportunity for Apple to increase marketshare.

I don’t think that is likely that Microsoft will lose their majority anytime soon, there are several market segments?business and gaming, for example?where they are too entrenched. That said, I don’t think it would be unreasonable for Apple to get back into double-digit market share numbers again.

Each platform has it’s strengths and weaknesses. Ultimately, they are just tools. I think that Apple is making a strong case to be ‘the’ system for home users. The iLife suite is simply the best and most comprehensive bundle for handling media I have seen. It would not surprise me to see a day in the near future where people have a PC at work and a Mac at home.

The release of BootCamp and Parallels, just cements that idea for me. Imagine that you can have your Mac at home and use it to do all the types of things that you want to do at home. All your music, photos, movies, internet, email, etc. will be handled by your Mac. But you need to run a Windows-only program at home for work occasionally. Well, just start up Windows and run it. Problem solved…on one system.

The next several years will be very interesting. Apple seems to have a good strategy and they are actually able to execute that strategy. Just wait until 2007, things are going to get interesting, especially if Vista gets pushed back again and Leopard is ready to roll.