On the Surface Microsoft Can't Out-market Apple

As the contrarian, I was hoping for so much more from Microsoft in marketing its big announcement this week.

When Apple introduces products they take the faithful from their website into the announcement, like a maitre d’ takes his favorite customers.  ‘But of course you would like to try our special today, which is why just for you I have confiscated the homepage and made it a giant picture of what our special of the day is.’

The Microsoft site on the other hand treats its effort to compete for the tablets like it’s the soup du jour in a cafeteria; just one of the banners that you can see, and not particularly weighted in the rotation.

Now logically, I can make a case for what Microsoft did, but when I went to the website, I saw a meaningless video that had to be done by a PR firm that was given nothing to work with, followed by a website that can’t even do the metro theme correctly for Windows 8.

What’s so sad is that I have seen Microsoft capture our imaginations before, so why is this marketing strategy so off track?

I think there are two reasons:

1. The internal politics of Microsoft that have now come to resemble GM with divisions and groups that don’t play well together
2. The external politics of wanting to be the enabling software for the rest of the hardware world; the result is a limp launch on a side sight.  

This is not going to leave Apple quaking in its boots and in truth should get some of Steve Ballmer’s wrath.

If you want to mess with Apple, I would put Xbox in charge of getting Surface’s act together at this point.  According to my copy of TWICE, Yusef Mehdi has promised that Xbox will deliver cross platform software.

In this app crazy world, you have to come with more than pretty hardware.

After all that’s only the surface.