Lying Microsoft Advertising

http://www.curi.us/1571-lying-microsoft-advertising

by xenophanes • 13 years ago

397 246 13 years ago

glhaynes5• 13 years ago

I clicked the title expecting it to be hyperbolic outrage at an advertising half-truth, but — yeah, that really is flat-out wrong. I can see how it could perhaps happen unintentionally, but Microsoft should definitely change the ad after they see this.

xenophanes5• 13 years ago

I'm pretty sure it got flagged off the front page by other people who expected the same from the title.

It dropped from #12 to #40 while the age went from around 17 to 19min and votes went up from 6 to 8. That can't be right without flags.

It's now #31 with 13 points and 27min, might get back on. It was also #31 less than a minute ago with 11 points, but 2 quick votes didn't move it up. That seems odd. Maybe I don't understand how this works, I don't know.

EDIT: and now it jumped to #7, still with 13 points. There must be some delay before stories move around, but I really don't get it.

EDIT 2: #1 and Daring Fireball picked it up. I really don't get to complain anymore :D http://daringfireball.net/linked/2013/05/23/screen-size-shen...

jmspring• 13 years ago

Seems like a lot of energy wondering about the dynamics of what people think about a posting.

benawabe896• 13 years ago

It seems to me as though most of Microsoft's advertising lately feels a tad deceitful/disingenuous. Whether it's trying to convince that Bing really is better than Google (really it is I promise), or that Windows 8 just blows people away with it's ease of use, I feel as though the campaigns are trying to convince me that I am the problem. Maybe I'm being unfair... not sure, it's just how it hits me.

Zikes• 13 years ago

Their "Mojave" campaign gave me the same impression. They invited people into tents to try out their latest and greatest OS, called Mojave, and after the person sang the OS's praises they revealed that it's actually Windows Vista.

The whole thing was basically Microsoft saying "you're all wrong, Vista is great and you just aren't smart enough to understand that unless we trick you into it".

famousactress• 13 years ago

I think the strategy worked pretty well for margarine and instant coffee. It's a proven technique whenever you've given up hope on elating consumers, but still have a product you need to convince people isn't quite as disappointing as they expected.

potatolicious• 13 years ago

This is a big part of why I can't take Microsoft seriously these days. I don't know if it's a function of their corporate culture, but they seem utterly incapable of being honest - either in their advertising or even with themselves.

Every major failure is couched as some kind of success. Windows 8 has been a flop no matter which way you cut it, but if you listen to Microsoft's external and internal messaging Win8 is a dramatic success that has sold like hotcakes.

I'm pretty sure if Microsoft was in charge of Chernobyl they'd find some way to spin it into a successful advancement of nuclear safety.

At some point you just have to come out with a mea culpa. Sorry guys, this was crappy, we will be better. Not every product is a smash hit, not every decision the right one - your ability to own up to these and fix these are infinitely more important to me as a customer than your ability to look me in the eye and call the sky purple with a perfect deadpan.

Tylerdt2• 13 years ago

How about things like Chromebooks failing utterly to sell even more than Windows RT yet Google proclaiming BS stats like topping Amazon instead of releasing real figures? http://www.zdnet.com/first-real-world-usage-figures-suggest-...

Or like proclaiming that one Celeron Chromebook had a Core processor? That story won't get upvoted on HN saying Google is lying(a much bigger lie than this one) but it's open season on Microsoft. PR is everywhere but people color it with their own biases.

jonas_maj7• 13 years ago

Windows 8 has been a ROARING success no matter which way you cut it. 100 million in 6 months is way more than any version of Mac OS or Google Chrome OS will EVER sell.

kenjackson4• 13 years ago

Windows 8 has been a flop no matter which way you cut it

They've sold 100 million licenses in 6 months. That's more than any competitor. Sure you can say it's a flop, but there's clearly ways to cut it where it's not. I think it's done surprisingly well considering the amount of change they put in it.

To put it another way, in six months I believe they've sold about as many Win8 licenses in six months as the iPad has sold in 3 years.

manacit• 13 years ago

This, among other things, is what happens when Microsoft hires a Political Strategist to be their Vice President for Strategic and Special Projects[1]

Frankly between their "Scroogled" campaign and all of their other advertisements, I'm starting to lose a lot of what respect I had for MSFT.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Penn

xenophanes5• 13 years ago

LilValleyBigEgo, looks like you are hellbanned. All your comments are dead. https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=LilValleyBigEgo

You need to make a new account.

lawnchair_larry2• 13 years ago

Wow, looks like he was hellbanned for a year and a half, still contributing, and I don't see anything wrong with the few posts prior to the ban. Account hasn't submitted spam. What an abuse of the hellban feature.

jamesaguilar3• 13 years ago

To say that, don't you need to know that no other reason was in play? For example, he made a lot of unpopular comments before he was banned. Perhaps he made some other accounts to upvote himself to counteract this. My point is, you don't actually know that any abuse occurred unless you know why he was banned, and you don't.

anxx• 13 years ago

It's only in the US that I have seen advertisements for a product include direct bashing of a competitor's product. I am not talking about a list of features where you show in which way yours is superior; that is still acceptable (although also deceiving much of the time). I am talking about ads like the Nimoy-Quinto Audi commercial where Nimoy had stupid problems fitting stuff into the Mercedes.

This is such a jarring way to advertise, it's like watching a bully beat a defenseless kid - does anybody feel more sympathy towards the product this way?

criley• 13 years ago

I've always chalked it up not as advertising but as branding. Those commercials serve to build a brand around a product and keep current owners involved in the brand, through feelings of superiority or whatever.

It's like CocaCola commercials: they don't need awareness through advertising, they want branding. Everyone knows what Coke is, but they want you to associate happiness with their product, so they keep branding.

So when I see luxury brands bashing each other, I imagine that's part of what rich people pay BMW and Mercedes for. For that feeling of "I'm better than you because I own X", which the brands deliver through marketing like this.

mullingitover• 13 years ago

> This is such a jarring way to advertise, it's like watching a bully beat a defenseless kid - does anybody feel more sympathy towards the product this way?

At least in this case, the iPad is so dominant that they probably feel there's no alternative but to address it directly. I'm sure the marketing team knows better, but they're making the comparison because they're in a position of extreme weakness. It's an act of desperation. The defenseless kid here is actually Microsoft.

snprbob86• 13 years ago

Apple ran the "I'm a Mac; I'm a PC" ads. Those started off as great advertising because they only pointed out bad things about Windows that everyone already accepted as bad things. Once those ads started becoming unnecessarily adversarial, they became bad advertising. Apple probably ran that campaign a bit too long.

Depending on your point of view, Apple's products are either A) Clearly superior or B) Not obviously inferior. For a not insignificant number of people, their choice of smartphone is a personal statement. Attacking products that people love is not a good way to create converts.

Attacking products that clearly suck works until a point. Then it starts to feel like a bully beating a defenseless kid. Microsoft's advertising feels more like a nerdy kid who spent all night thinking up clever and witty retorts, only to fail miserably in delivering them when face to face with the bully. The crowd of cool kids don't laugh with the nerdy kid, they laugh at them.

tbrownaw2• 13 years ago

Depending on your point of view, Apple's products are either A) Clearly superior or B) Not obviously inferior.

I prefer systems with a window manager that actually supports multi-tasking.

Having one shared menu bar is a pain. Having a row of icons for possibly-already-running applications, instead of a list of what windows you have open, is a pain.

Click-to-raise is less of a pain, but still annoying. Which is why I run XFCE on my desktop at home, since MS Windows and Gnome (and I think KDE?) get this one just as wrong as Apple does.

nsxwolf• 13 years ago

You aren't likely to convert any current tablet owner with a commercial. You can influence the customers who aren't married to any ecosystem or brand, though.

Someone3• 13 years ago

In the EU, such advertisements are illegal. http://europa.eu/legislation_summaries/consumers/consumer_in...:

"Comparative advertising

Comparative advertising explicitly or by implication makes reference to a competitor or competing goods or services.

This type of advertising is only permitted when it is not misleading. It can be a legitimate means of informing consumers of what is in their interests. Therefore, in particular, the comparisons should:

- relate to goods or services which meet the same needs or are intended for the same purpose;

- relate to products with the same designation of origin;

- deal objectively with the material, relevant, verifiable and representative features of those goods or services, which may include price;

- avoid creating confusion between traders, and should not discredit, imitate or take advantage of the trade mark or trade names of a competitor."

That is one reason why you will not see such advertising in the EU. Another may be cultural; in some EU countries, all comparative advertising was illegal before this EU directive (yes, you could not even show your product as being inferior in every way)

Finally, some would see this as the offenseless kid attempting to beat the captain of the boxing team.

amatix3• 13 years ago

> This type of advertising is only permitted when it is not misleading

Maybe you missed a bit? It's perfectly legal, you just need to be 100% factual, and if you're not you'll get taken to the cleaners in court. So people are suitably wary of using it, but it does happen.

(Same basic principles apply in New Zealand, fwiw)

smacktoward• 13 years ago

The conventional wisdom is that you should punch up, not down. In other words, if you're behind the market leader, it's OK to throw a punch at it in your ads, because your product isn't as widely known or understood as theirs is. But if you are the market leader, you don't throw punches at competitors, because you're already winning and doing so just reminds the viewer/reader/whatever that other alternatives exist.

This mitigates the "defenseless kid" syndrome a bit, because if you only punch up you're by definition only taking on products that are stronger in the marketplace than yours is.

You can see this in action by comparing Apple's ads. They had no problem running the "I'm a Mac" ads when their product (the Mac) was far behind the market leader (Windows PCs). But iPad ads don't do product comparisons, because the iPad owns the tablet market so there's no upside to reminding people that "tablet" does not necessarily equal "iPad."

mturmon• 13 years ago

The classic example of the conventional wisdom you mention is Avis "We Try Harder" (#2) versus Hertz (#1).

philwelch• 13 years ago

Coke vs. Pepsi is a classic example. In the Cola Wars, Pepsi, from time to time, punches up against Coke far, far more than Coke ever attacks Pepsi. Coke certainly increased their advertising in response to Pepsi in the height of the cola wars but they never attacked Pepsi outright.

Comparison advertising is also a "marketing smell" (by analogy to "code smell"). If you're doing comparison advertising, you're probably in a Cola War. Cola wars are a negative-sum game where you only have to increase advertising if the competition does--sort of a prisoners dilemma. It's preferable to avoid getting into those.

mtgx3• 13 years ago

Yes, I think it's illegal in Europe, or at least in some countries.

Lewton3• 13 years ago

Advertising like that is illegal here in denmark. it's one of the biggest 'culture shocks' I had when visiting the USA. Turning on the tv and seeing an ad openly trashing another product (Along side with seeing a movie edited for tv and broken up with ads every 10 minutes. Also illegal in denmark)

The ad in question was for some kind of medicine for upset stomachs.. A guy is sitting at a bar complaining about his stomach going "I tried this medicine" holds competitors product up to the camera "But it didn't work AT ALL" and then his friend saying "oh there's your problem, this will fix it"..

Very bizarre and shockingly disgusting way to advertise (for someone who grew up in a culture without it)

bostonpete• 13 years ago

> Very bizarre and shockingly disgusting way to advertise

Seems more direct than the alternative. If you believe you have strengths compared to your major competitor, why is it bad to lay out the comparison explicitly in your marketing? Sure, comparative advertising can go to far, but why not leave it up the company doing the advertising to make sure they don't come off looking petty?

HelloMcFly5• 13 years ago

> Very bizarre and shockingly disgusting way to advertise (for someone who grew up in a culture without it)

Can you explain why you think this way? Sure, it's not polite, but I don't see how competing for market share would or should be a gentleman's game.

jdrobins2000• 13 years ago

That isn't just culture shock. That is a clear example of the higher integrity (in general) of Danish society than the US. That is, they place a higher value on honesty, fairness, and contributing positively to society. I am from the US, have always lived in the US, and have never been to Denmark. But from my few experiences with people from Denmark, and knowledge about their political/economic/social affairs, it is clear to me this is the case. I understand the analogy about vulgar language, but in my opinion this involves issues of ethics and core values much deeper than just "offensive" words.

To those who misunderstand, it is not a problem to compare your company or product to a competitor. It is only a problem to make a comparison on anything other than a strictly objective, factual basis, which is in no way deceptive (See the comments regarding EU law). I would guess those countries that banned (or still ban) comparisons did so to avoid the hassle of trying to sort out whether something was permissible or not.

jmduke• 13 years ago

To talk about this from a marketing perspective:

Comparative advertising is best described as a necessary evil. Marketers hate using it -- it's their equivalent of the nuclear option. It's cheap, unimaginative, and universally weakens the customer's evaluation of the brand.

The issue is that it, like a nuclear bomb, it's incredibly effective. Customers remember comparative advertising better, digest it more effectively, and it helps disseminate cognitive information clearly. Ironically, customers internalize comparative advertising more often with regards to the product being denigrated (ie. "This product is worse!") than with the product being promoted (ie. "This product is better!") This is important with low-effort purchases like <$20 consumer goods.

(As an aside: I think the idea of making comparative advertisements illegal is absolutely absurd. What should be made illegal, though, are advertisements like this, which are blatantly false no matter what the fine print says.)

gcb0• 13 years ago

yes, in Europe it's subtle at least.

remember a BMW (or audi, or benz) comercial where it showed a spy type scaping from several bad guys, and all the bad guys had the competitor car (i think the bad guys had mbenz) and they were all sliding off curves and crashing...

zalew• 13 years ago

there were quite a lot BMW/Audi/Merc competitive commercials in the US market. to name a few:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VohEkWMkbsI

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=auEdEYY3ao4

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XfTyVL9TQmA

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oWh6sSl_5Is

geoka9• 13 years ago

Maybe slightly off-topic, but I came across a sly (and clever) way to advertise by belittling your competition:

http://www.specialized.com/us/en/bc/SBCBkModel.jsp?spid=3844...

The 404 page ("Oops! Looks like we lost one").

Anyone who is into road cycling will get the pun immediately. Specialized vs Giant. The Rabobank team rides Giants. While the Specialized guy is riding in the front of the pack on that picture :)

Ihmahr• 13 years ago

Remember the camera incident with their new phone?

Spearchucker• 13 years ago

I remember it well. It was indeed a PR gaff, not Microsoft's ad (Nokia shot that ad), but not misleading - the camera delivers. I know this because I use that camera daily, and it really is as stable (if not more) than that ad suggested it was.

chollida1• 13 years ago

In chrome(Version 26.0.1410.64 m) the linked page just show up as blank.

Is this some sort of odd way of saying that Microsoft isn't lying in their advertising?

xenophanes5• 13 years ago

Refresh the page.

Server problems, sorry. I added page caching a little while ago and also moved the image to dropbox instead of my own server (I hope that is OK to do).

danbruc10• 13 years ago

(Sadly) advertising is just about that - bending the truth until it looks good; highlighting your strengths and not mentioning your weaknesses. If showing two images that are not to scale is the only thing wrong with this add, the headline is really exaggerated.

And the diagonal is larger, nowhere did they mention that larger display means larger display area. So at best the used metric is unintuitive, meaningless and/or underspecified, but that's far from lying. Welcome to the world of advertising.

mikeash8• 13 years ago

Just because everyone does it doesn't mean it's not lying and doesn't mean the headline is exaggerated.

danbruc10• 13 years ago

Admittedly the add is lying if you use the weaker interpretation (To convey a false image or impression.) instead of the stronger and more common one (To give false information intentionally.). Yes, the images do the former form of lying but the numbers are still correct.

But if you start to use the weaker interpretation of lying to judge adds, than all adds not mentioning the product's weaknesses are lying and I guess the number of non-lying adds will settle very close to zero.

daliusd• 13 years ago

Well images are scaled differently: iPad is scaled down more than other device. That's the main problem. It is not forgetting to mention something it is blatant visual manipulation.

josefresco• 13 years ago

In defense of a wider/more horizontal form factor, it sure helps when displaying more than one app at-a-time. Which coincidentally is one of the main selling points of Win8.

I know that sounds a bit snarky, but it sure sounds and feels better than fuzzy math.

ajross• 13 years ago

It's also better for most video content; an iPad watching a 16:9 TV stream is only using 75% of the screen. Apple itself has moved to a widescreen format for the iPhone 5, and I wouldn't be surprised to see a future iPad do that too. I think there's lots of value to squarer aspect ratios for desktop/text usage (c.f. the Chromebook Pixel moving slightly in the opposite direction), but for a media device like a phone or tablet I'd expect them all to converge on the aspect used by content.

Obviously none of that has to do with the bad math in the MS ad. The iPad screen is, in fact, larger than the Asus one.

melling• 13 years ago

I don't have the book handy but I think Edward Tufte discussed this sort of lying in his classic book.

http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/17744.The_Visual_Display_...

jere2• 13 years ago

It's like the Megahertz Myth. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Megahertz_myth

Their claim is technically true, if the way you agree to measure size is diagonally (this is how TVs are advertised after all), and also pretty meaningless and disingenuous. What I find interesting is that Apple on the other hand rarely seems to focus the message on numbers, even when they have a real numerical advantage.

hjay• 13 years ago

Apple seems to appeal to consumers by the appearance and experience more than anything. When they do mention numbers, it's always "x% faster, x% smaller!", which is really all anyone cares about -- "How much better is this compared to what I already have?"

frogpelt2• 13 years ago

Technically, their claim is completely false.

Could I also claim that a 12" by 1" touchscreen is bigger than a 10.1" since it has a 12.04" diagonal?

michael_h• 13 years ago

Sure. The operative part of that sentence is: if the way you agree to measure size is diagonally

akmiller• 13 years ago

I think what they say is shady, but as the parent of this thread states, it is technically accurate to say that their screen is larger by industry standard measurements (i.e. corner to corner).

jff2• 13 years ago

Screens are traditionally measured diagonally. This worked fine when everything was a 4:3 ratio. Now that ratios are more variable, but we still use that measurement. Microsoft's claim about the diagonal measurement is absolutely true; they never mentioned screen area. Apple was certainly happy to make the iPhone 5 screen taller and call it a brilliant, beautiful, amazing, really great, 4" screen.

mikeash8• 13 years ago

Apple not only refrains from focusing on numbers, but they actively go out of their way not to.

Apple simply does not list any number they don't think is important. For example, this is the sum total of their information, in their tech specs, about what kind of CPU the iPad has, how fast it is, and how much RAM it has:

"Dual-core A6X with quad-core graphics"

If you want to know the clock rate or RAM quantity, you have to go to third-party sites that have basically reverse-engineered the information.

To a techie, this behavior looks mildly crazy, but it seems to work.

amatix3• 13 years ago

> To a techie, this behavior looks mildly crazy, but it seems to work.

Problem is that the numbers are mostly meaningless, and are becoming ever more so. People don't buy cars based on the type of brakes, the size of the oil sump, or even the number of cylinders. "does it have enough power to pull a trailer?" "is the handling nice?" "do you get a lot of road noise?" "can I connect my iPhone into the stereo?" "does it look good?" "is it safe?" "is it comfortable?"

The PC industry for a long time has competed in "numbers", to it's detriment. You can't meaningfully compare a A6 vs Core2 vs i7 vs AMD vs ARM processors (let alone computers) by looking at clock speed - what you're actually wanting to know is "will it compile my code quickly?" "can the latest games run at a high frame rate?" "do I get good battery life?" "does it get hot?" "will it boot up quickly?" "can I connect 3x screens all playing simultaneous HD video?" - those questions are about the whole system, and arguably the OS/software/disks have magnitudes more impact than the actual CPU in a lot of cases.

Apple gets this. New iPads will always perform better than the previous one, just like virtually every tech device. And the only way to meaningfully compare against android or other tablets is by comparing battery life, UI response, app startup times, display types - all system-level comparisons.

r00fus• 13 years ago

I really don't understand why this is crazy at all. Clock speeds haven't been useful for years in determining your overall system preformance (have they ever, really? There are so many numbers involved in getting a meaningful picture of performance for almost any computing device that putting that information out there would confuse most people.

Furthermore, you can't just run almost any OS on the iPad anyway (like, say, you can with a Mac) so it's not directly relevant as say, on a PC.

Tylerdt2• 13 years ago

Video ad is here. Is there a size difference in the video too?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=8...

xenophanes5• 13 years ago

Video looks accurate to me. iPad taller and less wide.

olegbl2• 13 years ago

Clearly, no other company ever tried to tweak sizing or dimension of products in diagrams for their own benefit. Definitely not Apple.

http://www.pcworld.com/article/238047/apple_offers_flawed_ev...

http://www.itworld.com/it-managementstrategy/195473/apple-fi...

itg• 13 years ago

So that makes this deceitful ad by Microsoft okay?

olegbl2• 13 years ago

No, but this article was a bit of sensationalist hype (which, btw, I thought was against hacker news conduct?) This kind of stuff should be taken in context.

danbruc10• 13 years ago

Which add is not deceitful because it highlights strengths and hides weaknesses? It makes absolutely no sense to attack a single add, they all do it, so if you want to complain, complain about all adds.

guelo• 13 years ago

Here's a proportional image of a VivoTab-shaped rectangle on top of an iPad-shaped rectangle, http://i.imgur.com/UvhNuTA.png

I think the bigger dishonesty is the omission of screen resolution. The VivoTab is 1366x768 vs iPad's 2048x1536. That's three times more pixels crammed into an approximately similar area.

redblacktree5• 13 years ago

Thanks. It's actually really hard to see from that image which one is larger.

mtgx3• 13 years ago

That's not the point. The op already says the difference is 3% (in iPad's favor). The problem is Microsoft says the Windows one is 36% bigger.

mtgx3• 13 years ago

They do the same with the ads against Google, too. They compare themselves in some areas where they can win, and of course disregard all the other areas where they lose. Or worse, they accuse Google of something themselves are doing.

It was pretty much the whole strategy for the "Windows Phone 8 Challenges", too, for which they picked tests where only WP8 can win, and even when they lost they tried to work around acknowledging a win for the Android or iPhone owner.

socillion2• 13 years ago

> They compare themselves in some areas where they can win, and of course disregard all the other areas where they lose.

Aren't you describing how marketing has worked since the dawn of time? I'm genuinely curious why this is worthy of discussion except as an example of how companies commonly market their product.

It seems preposterous to me to expect that companies would willfully enumerate aspects of their product that are weaker than the competition.

photorized• 13 years ago

Their #scroogled campaign tweets were primarily fueled by the contest to win $500 prepaid Visa card - so they were essentially paying people to bash Google. Nobody noticed.

at-fates-hands• 13 years ago

Wouldn't this would be irrelevant when you went to a store and saw both side-by-side?

You can fluff your marketing all you want with any kinds of images. As soon as the consumer sees it up close and personal in real life, the jig is up.

kevinrpope• 13 years ago

When you're buying online, you're not getting that option.

randomfool• 13 years ago

Love how they use a white iPad and black Asus on a white background here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=8...

Makes the iPad's bezel blend into the background and makes the VivoTab look larger.

emp_zealoth2• 13 years ago

Honestly? It's unfair because they hid a dead-weight bezel?

thezilch3• 13 years ago

Hanlon's razor, or in Goethe's The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774): "...misunderstandings and neglect create more confusion in this world than trickery and malice. At any rate, the last two are certainly much less frequent."

The same box, in dimensions, was used for the ASUS VivoTab Smart [0], Dell XPS 10 [1], HP ENVY x2 [2], and Microsoft Surface RT [3]. WTF lies!?!? Nay, the page designer was probably just neglectful -- eyeballed or baselined each iteration from a single, different model. Also, every screen manufacturer or advertising will speak towards the diagonal length, where the VivoTab has a lengthier, "bigger" screen.

[0] http://res2.windows.microsoft.com/resbox/en/6.2/2012-win8ga/...

[1] http://res1.windows.microsoft.com/resbox/en/6.2/2012-win8ga/...

[2] http://res2.windows.microsoft.com/resbox/en/6.2/2012-win8ga/...

[3] http://res2.windows.microsoft.com/resbox/en/6.2/2012-win8ga/...

redblacktree5• 13 years ago

However, they do flat-out lie in the text.

> At the bottom, Microsoft writes, "The ASUS VivoTab Smart is lighter than the iPad, has a bigger touchscreen...". False. It does not have a "bigger touchscreen".

recursive• 13 years ago

It depends how you define "bigger". There is arguably some good-faith definition of "bigger" for which it's true. (like diagonal measurement)

biot2• 13 years ago

So an 8 foot ladder which has rungs 24 inches wide is bigger than a 12 foot ladder which has rungs 15 inches wide?

aaron695• 13 years ago

No, I'd still go with Hanlon's razor, I'd guess whoever wrote it though it was true.

tvon• 13 years ago

I think you're right, but I think they should still be called out for it.

codegeek• 13 years ago

reminds of the ad Microsoft is running that they call "Scroogled". They claim that Bing is better than google and even have ppl on TV test it out. I tried taking that challenge and bing fails 95% of the time compared to google results.

HelloMcFly5• 13 years ago

Bing has won that test for my, my girlfriend, and 3/5 of my office mates. I still use Google most of the time out of habit, but I was still surprised by the results.

I'm not saying I'm representative of any particular group, but I don't think the fact that it didn't work for you makes the whole campaign a farce.

thedufer• 13 years ago

IIRC, they won by suggesting single-word search strings. For very easy searches, Bing slightly edges out Google, but no one cares, because both of them have the thing you're looking for on the first page. For those awful long-tail searches, Bing completely flames out, while Google often does a decent job. For a more interesting test, try describing things as if you know what you're looking for but can't remember the name (movies, products, etc.).

pdubs• 13 years ago

For "normal" things I ended up slightly leaning towards Bing; for programming and technical searching it was Google by a mile.

piyush_soni• 13 years ago

Well, I don't see where are they lying. There might have scaled the images differently for various reasons. Of course, they could have done it the proper way, but it can't be called outright 'lying'.

jonas_maj7• 13 years ago

Apple's 4:3 screen for tablets are outdated and completely unusable. 16:9 is the way to go for any modern computing device. 4:3 is terrible for watching HD videos or browsing websites -- all of which are made with a 16:9 screen in mind.

Samuel_Michon4• 13 years ago

That’s true if you think tablets should only be used in landscape orientation. I like using the iPad in portrait mode, but on 16:9 screens portrait mode is very awkward for everything but reading novels.

As for smartphones: the maximum width of those screens is dictated by the average size of a human’s palm. If you make the screens wider than 2.5", for most people it will be uncomfortable to operate the phone with one hand. Look at the Galaxy Note[1] (which is 3.3" wide), it’s practically impossible to use with one hand.

[1] http://www.engadget.com/gallery/samsung-galaxy-note-ii-hands...

jonas_maj7• 13 years ago

For something you need to hold with both hands(which I assume how you use your iPad), I think the landscape orientation is more natural and comfortable. That's how we hold a book while reading lying down.

d0m• 13 years ago

>> Apple's 4:3 screen for tablets are outdated and completely unusable.

Is that a fact or an opinion?

>> 4:3 is terrible for watching HD videos or browsing websites -- all of which are made with a 16:9 screen in mind.

I also prefer watching videos in a widescreen format.. however, I prefer browsing the web in a portrait view. More often than not, the "side" of the web pages are used for navigation and ads. When it happens, I usually zoom on the content in the middle and read that in a portrait view.

----

I think your opinion is valid but not the way you express it. It sounds very aggressive and also comes out like if it was a hard fact. (Which is not, it's your opinion)

nairteashop2• 13 years ago

That may be true, but that's not the claim that MS made.

If their ad had shown a VivoTab and an iPad side-by-side playing a widescreen movie, I wouldn't have had a problem with it. (In fact I would've agreed with them that the VivoTab is probably the better device for viewing widescreen movies).

Instead their ad claims that the VivoTab is "larger", "lighter", etc all of which are objectively incorrect.

jlgreco9• 13 years ago

> In fact I would've agreed with them that the VivoTab is probably the better device for viewing widescreen movies

Of course the VivoTab can only play scaled down 1080p video. That probably does not matter to most people, but I really don't think Microsoft wants to go down that road.

alwaysdoit• 13 years ago

Why have we let the standard measurement of screen area be done with units of length?

Sometimes I wonder if the proliferation of widescreens is due to actual demand, or just being more marketable.

takluyver2• 13 years ago

At a guess, when all screens had similar aspect ratio, a length measurement was more convenient: you can measure it without a calculator, and people can hold their fingers apart and think 'about this big'. We don't seem to have the same kind of intuition with area measurements.

I suspect widescreens have a bit of both. For watching videos or having two documents on screen, a widescreen does make more sense.

orangethirty2• 13 years ago

This really shows how they are playing catch-up to Apple.

nivla4• 13 years ago

Yes,

In the mobile world everyone is playing catch up with Apple.

In the desktop world everyone is playing catch up with Microsoft.

In the search world everyone is playing catch up with Google.

In business you play catch up with the industry leader till you become one. Its part of being a business. Your Point?

orangethirty2• 13 years ago

The point that you missed is that you can either play catch up, or you can change the game. MS has the resources to change the game, but they lack the ability to do it.

runjake• 13 years ago

If you hate this, be sure to politely register your displeasure with @fxshaw on Twitter. Frank is the head PR guy for Microsoft.

Whether you like Microsoft or not, they have some promising new products, but I feel like they are sabotaging their efforts with lies like this.

alipang• 13 years ago

Reminds of the old download page for Internet Explorer 10, which had some nice quotes like: "Chrome users ... try IE10!"

Of course the ... hid something like "Yeah, if you're bored with Chrome, try IE10".

Another nugget from the same page was the qoute "Incredibly fast!" with the source set as " - Tweet".

Bill_Dimm3• 13 years ago

There are other, more subtle, sleazy things in that ad. Microsoft seems to choose how many places to display after decimal points in a "convenient" way.

Large batter life is good, so Microsoft displays "9.5" for its product, but "10" (not "10.0") for the iPad, making it less visually obvious (same number of digits) that the iPad is better.

Small weight is good, so Microsoft displays "1.3" for its product (not "1.30"), but "1.44" for the iPad, making the Microsoft number seem more favorable (one less digit) than it really is.

Of course, numbers are numbers and anyone that is even half-way thinking realizes that 9.5 and 10 are virtually the same (within 5%), and 1.3 and 1.44 are virtually the same (within 10%), but altering the number of digits probably does have some psychological impact on people that aren't really thinking.

jwoah123• 13 years ago

You do realize that in both cases they are eliminating a trailing 0, right? It is a major stretch to try to say this is sleazy.

Bill_Dimm3• 13 years ago

A) Actually, I don't know that it is a zero that is being dropped, even though that may be likely. If numbers were being reported by a scientist, dropped digits would be an indication that the measurement wasn't accurate to any more digits than those displayed, so 1.3 might really be 1.3476 but their measuring device just couldn't measure it that accurately.

B) I think it's pretty unusual to offer up a side-by-side comparison of numbers that aren't showing the same number of digits after the decimal point (hence, not a major stretch to call it sleazy). Do you ever see prices quoted as "$12.3" instead of "$12.30"?

jkrems• 13 years ago

Also the usage of color is fascinating: The put two things side-by-side and highlight one of them in gray and one in a subtle green, which immediately conveys the message "stronger color = better value". It looks like a product comparison with the better values highlighted. And isn't. The whole page is a great example of black-hat marketing.

nivla4• 13 years ago

>The whole page is a great example of black-hat marketing.

You mean similar to the Marketing tricks we now see everywhere?

The use of $X.99 or $X99.99 to subconsciously trick your brain into seeing a lower price point

The use of bold fonts to re-enforce the message

The choice of colors - Eg: Hollywood with Blue and Orange for posters and covers to enforce the cool and energetic feel.

I can agree that the page uses clever marketing but seriously black-hat? Not even remotely close.

geuis2• 13 years ago

And no one has mentioned the second, more obvious "lie" that jumped right out.

It says the iPad doesn't have Office. Well, that's because Microsoft hasn't released a version of Office for iOS.

I don't know the right word for it, but that's not honest either.

Negitivefrags• 13 years ago

Lets say you have two TVs. One TV says "We have Smart Screen 5.0 technology unlike that TV"

Would you say. "Thats a lie. The only reason that other TV doesn't have Smart Screen 5.0 technology is because you didn't offer to sell it to your competitor."

I don't think you should be under any obligation, legal or moral to be forced to licence your competitive advantage to your competitor.

jlgreco9• 13 years ago

> "We have Smart Screen 5.0 technology unlike that TV"

Slightly offtopic: What drives me crazy is when Company A will say "TV A has FizzBuzz(tm) Technology, TV B does not!" and Company B says "TV B has BuzzFizz(tm) Technology, TV A does not!" When FizzBuzz(tm) and BuzzFizz(tm) are really just the same shit with different trademarks.

It is probably "different" technology enough of the time, in that it does the same thing but in a different way with a different set of patents... but still.

geuis2• 13 years ago

Let me try again.

You make FOO. You also make XXX, which runs on FOO. XXX is very popular.

I make BAR. BAR is very popular, but can't run XXX.

BAR and FOO are competing products.

You say, "FOO is better than BAR because BAR doesn't have XXX."

You don't make a version of XXX that works on BAR.

You can't use the fact that you don't make Office for iOS as a short coming of iOS in advertising. That doesn't make your product better, it just means that you aren't making Office available.

Any clearer now?

rimantas2• 13 years ago

iPad does not have MS Office, but it does have iWork version for iOS.

nairteashop2• 13 years ago

I don't know, I think it's honest. In the eyes of many business users - myself included - the lack of Office is a legitimate shortcoming of the iPad (albeit one that I personally don't care much about).

It would be equally honest and fair for Apple to claim that Windows 8 doesn't have say, iMovie, or Flipboard. Again, some users may not care about those apps but at least it's a legitimate claim, unlike what's mentioned in the article.

patja• 13 years ago

They should make more of the lack of multiple user accounts on the iPad. Most families I know share an iPad among the whole household. The lack of separate user accounts is a major pain point.

tmzt• 13 years ago

I still remember when Steve praised Microsoft's fast user switching feature during an Apple keynote before introducing the OS X version.

Maybe something like "App Profiles" that have access to only a subset of the installed applications would work.

ianmcgowan• 13 years ago

It also seems somewhat disingenuous to complain about the lack of office apps on iPad, when MSFT is clearly to blame for that lack...

nivla4• 13 years ago

Well I would love an official Youtube app for my Windows Phone but Google doesn't make one and has no intention of. Can I blame Google?

NiekvdMaas• 13 years ago

I remember a keynote a Steve Jobs where he did something very similar: he presented a 3D pie chart, where the Apple part was highly distorted.

Picture: http://blogs.guardian.co.uk/technology/Jobs_08_keynote_dsc_0...

Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/blog/2008/jan/21/liesda...

tgcordell• 13 years ago

This isn't similar at all. Jobs and co are using the viewing angle of a 3d graph to have the Apple share be closer and 'larger' than the farther and now 'smaller' Other section.

What Windows is representing and outlining here has no basis in fact.

sneak• 13 years ago

> Jobs and co are using the viewing angle of a 3d graph to have the Apple share be closer and 'larger' than the farther and now 'smaller' Other section

Actually, the tablet _is_ bigger in the diagonal measurement as they claim, which is the standard measurement of screen sizes.

They're both subterfuge. Don't raise one above the other.

kemiller2• 13 years ago

A trick of perspective is a lesser lie than specifically claiming a smaller screen is bigger.

aninhumer• 13 years ago

Especially when combined with an accurate numerical reference.

hexasquid• 13 years ago

In face a trick of perspective is a 3% larger lie.

Steko• 13 years ago

So wait the complaint is that 19.5% is "highly distorted" to look bigger than 21.2% even though they are clearly labelled with the actual numbers?

If I wanted to minimize other I'd leave it off the chart. I've seen plenty of graphs do this without being called "highly distorted".

Apparently Jobs is a "snake oil salesman" because he puts the "other" category last instead of second even though "other" is probably a number of different companies that are presumably not broken out themselves because they are smaller.

FireBeyond2• 13 years ago

Apple's iPhone advertising was also the subject of several lawsuits that resulted in the (now) wide-ranging disclaimer of "Sequences shortened, screen images simulated", when they spent ads talking about how quick and easy it was to do things on the iPhone, that in reality took much longer than the demonstration implied.

kostya-kow• 13 years ago

Advertisement always bends facts to one side or the other. Usually ads put extra emphasis on a positive thing, while omitting the negative.

Even more often ads don't use facts -- they just play on people's feelings.

In any case, the goal of advertising is to deceive the buyer, not not inform them. So I don't think anything should be expected from any company that needs to satisfy shareholders. I don't see how Apple's ads with a man asking stupid questions from kids, or Droid's ads with cool robots is morally better then what M$ is doing. But in this case, MS is just being stupid and ruins their image. They don't even pretend to be a company that tries to be morally good. If this becomes more popular with mainstream media, the ad will hurt MS much more then it benefits them, same as this piece of FUD that got to the frontpage of /r/linux:

https://www.microsoft.com/hk/windowsserver/compare/windows-s...

In my opinion, all ads should be banned. It's a huge useless industry of liers. Corporations that are good with ads are not necessarily good at making products, but they get unfair advantage. It also distracts the main effort of from making a good product.

codereflection• 13 years ago

Although it's just a legend, this article just made me think of the tuna "Guaranteed not to turn pink in the can!" marketing spin.

kunai• 13 years ago

This is not only a problem that exists with Microsoft. Many PC makers push crap "widescreen" 16:9 displays with far less viewable area than a 4:3 screen, and obscenely little vertical res/height, and push it as a "feature."

I'm sick of Apple being the only one with decent displays. Why do the PC makers insist on using 16:9 displays when they HAVE the money and the power to afford 16:10, 4:3, or even 3:2, a la Chromebook Pixel?

If it's just to cut costs, then, Lenovo, Toshiba, HP, Dell, Acer, -- fuck you.

http://xkcd.com/732/

jlgreco9• 13 years ago

I used to assume it was about cutting costs, but I'm not so sure anymore. Samsung apparently has a 3200x1800 (16:9) at 13.3" laptop coming out. That beats the chromebook pixel by a decent amount and certainly cannot be cheap... I think they must have some market research that suggests people actually do want 16:9 for whatever reason.

ywang0414• 13 years ago

This is not much of a surprise at all. Corps have been doing this sort of lying right in our face strategy for years. Same as when T-Mobile started calling their HSPA network 4G and claiming they have the largest "4G" network in the nation. All complete BS but the masses are buying into it. It's just marketing after all.

I really think there needs to be a mainstream service perhaps run by the government to regulate all these commercials. After all, information is the most valuable commodity. And shoveling mis-information down people's throats might as well be poisoning people directly.

kenjackson4• 13 years ago

Looks like they changed the ad. Hardly seems malicious.

danbruc10• 13 years ago

They just changed the images - now there are only numbers.

laureny• 13 years ago

> I got the link from Daring Fireball.

Shocking.

nhebb• 13 years ago

Big picture wise, I don't think Microsoft's advertising group is very good. In this case Hanlon's Razor probably applies. I don't know what target market would find the Surface Pro dancing commercials compelling. (My guess is: none.) The new Office ads focus on silly things like deleting large numbers of emails, which is underwhelming from a sales-worthy feature standpoint. And then there were the early Windows 8 ads with the little girl creating art in the new Paint app. Anyone who has purchased color ink would look at that wall of art and see huge dollar signs (at least I did).

I don't know if I would blame the ad group though. When the ads focus of the fluffy stuff, I take it as a sign that they struggled to find real features and benefits to push.

ebf• 13 years ago

They removed the screen images and changed the copy so it says

>The ASUS VivoTab Smart is lighter than the iPad, has more ports, works with more printers, lets you see two apps at once, and runs Microsoft Office and other desktop programs.

Glad this 346 upvotes and 216 comments compared to the Xbox threads that were flagged off the frontpage. Great discussion Hacker News!

Lying Microsoft Advertising

Related Stories