Downgrading Apple - the Windows Brand vs. the Windows Products

From Bill Gates and Jerry Seinfeld's the Future Is Delicious to I'm a PC; Windows vs. Walls; Life Without Walls; the fake “I'm a PC Guy” John Hodgman (aka Sean Siller, senior program manager for networking in the Windows Core Operating System Division), the Redmond giant is evolving along its initial Free the People strategy designed to tell the truth about Windows. The first signs of Microsoft clearing its voice in the market were delivered by Brad Brooks, corporate vice president, Windows Consumer Product Marketing as early as the start of June 2008.

The Windows Brand vs. the Windows Products

“Windows has always been about putting the power of computing in the hands of people. All of these efforts are designed to reconnect and re-ignite our customers’ imaginations around the value of Windows in their lives today, and the promise of Windows in their lives tomorrow,” explained Bill Veghte, Senior Vice President, Online Services & Windows Business Group with the initial launch of the Windows campaign on September 4.

Microsoft is laboring to span Windows across various segments of the consumer market, delivering a segmentation in relation to the PC, to mobile phones and to the Cloud. In this manner, the Redmond company is elevating the Windows brand above the products that it is inherently associated with. Designed as a subtle divorce between Windows and the underlying software solutions or cloud services, the strategy is to make the brand independent of any product.

While the Windows brand has indeed suffered because of competitors such as Apple, the fact is that it has also been hurt by Microsoft itself. The Redmond giant can go head over heels with multi-million marketing campaigns but it won't change the fact that Windows Vista as a product has eroded the Windows brand. At the same time, the company's modest positioning on the operating system market for mobile phones, coupled with the confusing soup of applications and services between MSN and Windows Live for the past years, has also impacted the value of Windows, at a conceptual level.