Well, folks, get ready to suspend your disbelief. Microsoft has done it again. There’s a new ad campaign in which someone is given money and asked to go into a consumer electronics store and buy a note-book. Once again, Microsoft demonstrates that they require suspension of disbelief to get their point across.
In this particular instance, the victim of this wrongheaded scheme is tasked with finding the right product for two grand. The entry-level MacBook Pro, which happens to list for that price, is rejected because it only has 2GB of RAM, whereas the HP model selected instead has 4GB.
Alas, what Microsoft doesn’t show you is that the Mac note-book has a speedier processor and uses faster memory than the HP, so it is in fact a better buy. No doubt equipping the latter with a heftier processor would raise its purchase price to the point where it is similar to the MacBook if it were updated with same memory complement. But that’s not something Microsoft wants you to know.
The other peculiar element to this campaign is the fact that the selected PCs are inevitably from HP. That sounds, to me, far too coincidental, since the consumer electronics outlets visited all have several brands from which to select. More to the point, HP is not known as a value brand. So what sort of collusion is going on here anyway? This is far too suspicious to be simply coincidental.
Or does it mean that HP is, in fact, paying a portion of the bill for this campaign? I’m curious. Aren’t you?
Story continued in this week’s Tech Night Owl Newsletter. [1]