Seen the latest commercial from Microsoft? The spot claims to have found an “artist” who wants to find the right computer for video editing. I don’t wanna spoil the ending for you, but she chooses a PC over a Mac. Microsoft wants us to all believe that, in the words of Irving Berlin, “Anything you (Mac) can do, I (Windows) can do better.” Only one teensy, tiny little problem. It’s all a lie.

In 1987, I was hired by Micrografx to become a part of the sales and marketing team. My first day at work was, coincidentally, the first day of COMDEX, where we showing off the soon-to-be-released Micrografx Designer 1.0. Quickly moving from Sales to Marketing, I assumed the reins of the Creative Services Group, the in-house ad agency for the company. My first task was to fix display ads that only a propellerhead could love, and brand the company and the Designer product. Our big competition at the time was Illustrator, for it (as well as Aldus FreeHand) were the big dogs of vector design. The conventional wisdom in the design world was, if you were gonna do any serious design work on a computer, you needed to buy a Mac – PCs need not apply. At the time, that was somewhere between a lie and and a gross exaggeration. In 1987, feature for feature, Designer on the PC was a better, more full-featured product than Illustrator on the PC. This was because Illustrator for the PC in it’s first release cost more than the Mac version and had fewer features (it could print in color, but it couldn’t display in color). I realized that, for vector design at least, you didn’t need to buy a Mac to get work done. I created a campaign that coined a word – MacEnvy. My campaign pointed out the superior features of Designer and positioned it as “the cure for MacEnvy.” The campaign was a huge success – in the late 80′s Micrografx blew Illustrator out of the water, with over 80% market share. Fast forward to 2009…

Micrografx is history – purchased by Corel. FreeHand was orphaned with Macromedia was acquired by Adobe. I’m not even sure that they make Designer any more. Illustrator on the PC is now every bit the application it is on the Mac. Most publishers write their apps for both Mac and PC, and keep feature set parity a priority. So which platform is better?

If you’re looking for “cheap” or “disposable” computers, the PC is the smart buy. But if you want to get a computer that is capable of, say, encoding video, editing video, or anything else that requires power, speed, and ease-of-use, you’d be an idiot to buy anything but a Mac. I say this with a good deal of authority, because I’m still stuck using a PC.

At one time, I had both a Mac (Quadra 950) and a PC on my desk. Every time a app update came out, I had to buy two upgrades – one for the Mac, one for the PC. My wife convinced me to choose one platform or the other, and ditch the loser. I chose PC, because the hardware was cheaper, and most of my clients ran PCs. Today, a high-end Mac costs about the same as a high-end PC, and my clients couldn’t care less what I use. What I care about, however, is being able to get work done. XP is clunky. Vista is a steaming pile of dung. Windows 7? Don’t get me started. Mac’s OS is easy to use, reliable, and doesn’t get in your way. Here’s a comparison: It’s a good day when I don’t have to reboot my PC more than once or twice. I’ve a video editor friend here in town. He has to reboot…um…well “seldom” would be accurate – say, once a month, on the average. It takes either my desktop or laptop PCs about 5 to 7 minutes to reboot from a system reset button. There are days that I have to reboot a dozen times – usually when I’m working on large files (i.e.: video clips). That’s not just inconvenient. That’s wrong.

So the bottom line is, even if a Mac was more expensive by a grand, you’d still be better off with it over a PC that will cost you time, money, and visits to your doctor to prescribe BP meds for hypertension. Microsoft may want to claim that they are the better choice, but unless you’re a Hermann Goebbels fan, let Microsoft peddle th Big Lie to someone that confuses “marketing” with “reality.”

This entry was posted on Saturday, May 9th, 2009 at 11:01 pm and is filed under advertising, marketing.You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.