Microsoft, Mac, Computer Troubles and Advertising

Famous blog­ger Robert Scoble has pub­lished a very inter­est­ing post today about Apple’s adver­tis­ing and brand promise fol­low­ing his expe­ri­ence upgrad­ing his Mac com­puter with Apple’s lat­est updates. He is mak­ing the point that Apple claims the Apple expe­ri­ence is bet­ter, that Apple builds bet­ter qual­ity com­put­ers, var­i­ous hard­ware and soft­ware than its com­peti­tors. So when he reported prob­lems with his upgrade, many apple users flocked to his site to post com­ments blam­ing him for his trou­bles and crit­i­ciz­ing him for crit­i­ciz­ing Apple’s marketing.

I don’t usu­ally com­ment on issues like this but I have seen this kind of wolf pack men­tal­ity before as well and I find it dis­turb­ing. I don’t drink anyone’s Kool-​Aid and I find those Windows/​Mac debates tire­some and irrel­e­vant because my com­puter is ulti­mately just a tool to me. Not a social stand­ing object and not a way to try and be cool. Both sides will argue that their camp is the best and you are basi­cally a moron for believ­ing oth­er­wise. But Mac fanat­ics just have this extra lit­tle bit of zeal, that smug self-​righteousness of the “true believer”. Not every Mac user is like that of course and many of them see their machines sim­ply as the tools that they really are. But there are those who really buy into the Mac lifestyle thing or the “brand promise” Scoble talks about. Nothing wrong with that if it makes you happy but when any crit­i­cism of the Mac mar­ket­ing hype brings on the flames then maybe these Mac users take their lit­tle Apple branded giz­mos a lit­tle bit too seriously…

They’re just com­put­ers peo­ple, it’s not the brand name on them that mat­ters, it’s what you cre­ate with them!