Microsoft presents Montage

Posted on December 14, 2010 by IdeaMonster

First of all I’m impressed how microsoft comes back from the ashes of crappy advertising and reinvents itself in that manner. Most of their recent ads are actually AMAZING pieces of work. It’s good to see that the “boring old PC” is getting the creative treatment. Well corporation-wise at least.

But the main thing I’d like to mention here is that they’re introducing a cloud based “magazine editor” that allows users to create their own magazines from the content from the web. This is an amazing idea and in fact I think it will be another thing that revolutionizes journalism in the e-world. Sure most of the things will be crappy, clip-art things from people with no imagination, but imagine those tools in the hands of someone wanting to do something really creative who doesn’t have programming knowledge. Yeah, that’s right! It can be huge. We just have to wait and see.

Creative Windows ad – mac vs pc all over again

Posted on November 11, 2010 by IdeaMonster

The Mac vs PC war has been fought ruthlessly all over the interwebs for at least a decade now, both on the advertising and on social front. And as with any controversial subject there are fans of both sides. But Microsoft didn’t really make creative ads before, and now it’s trying to show that PC’s are not “square” and “office and games” only and can be used to make really nice, creative things. Good! Because in the end the machine is just the means to achieving a goal that comes up in the mind of it’s creator. And the mind is not yet branded with any logo. See the cool video below :

Microsoft pushes it’s creativity with Windows Phone 7 ads

Posted on September 25, 2010 by IdeaMonster

But isn’t this a little bit too far? I mean advertising a phone that you’ll use less than your current phone? Who are they trying to catch with that idea? Besides their current competition (iphone and android phones) are also very easy to use and have streamlined interfaces that allow people to just “glance” at the phone quickly instead of the old-time “stop-and-stare”. They might be a couple of years late to the party, just like with Windows. Oh and the interface of the main screen is pretty U-GLY… It gets a bit better when you’re in the phone functions but still somewhat “modern for the sake of being cool”. And we all know how it ends when someone tries to be cool so hard…

David and Goliath

Posted on May 26, 2010 by IdeaMonster

Today something a little bit creepy had happened. For the first time (probably ever) Apple’s Market Cap exceeded the one of Microsoft. Yeah, I know. We’ve been always under the impression that the Microsoft empire will forever be there as the most powerful and evil monopoly. As they say in cheesy movies – with great power comes great responsibility. And since Apple right now has the upper hand, we’ll probably see a lot more “influencing the world” on their part. Remember apple fans being mad that people were choosing Windows platform and PC’s? Well right now they’re forced to choose HTML5 over flash for instance. And there’s a new iAd (html5 of course) going to be released soon. So is apple going to be evil?

Or maybe in the modern world, where google, apple and microsoft each try to stand by google’s “don’t be evil”, no big corporation can actually be the good guys or they’ll loose the fight? As I always said, I use apple products and I like them, both the operating system and the devices. But I don’t want MSFT to fall, just like I don’t want to see Google fall. There needs to be competition! There need to be windows7 tablet devices. And Android tablet devices! And if both of those run flash, we’ll just wait and see who comes out of that little fight alive. Because being first doesn’t always guarantee success.

I personally hope that we’ll be able to still creative memorable and innovative advertisements instead of being stuck with all that “interactive html5 toy story bullshit” that we’ve seen a few months ago.

Internet Explorer web share is shrinking

Posted on May 10, 2010 by IdeaMonster

browsers
According to a recent survey by “Net Applications” this is the first time in 10 years when IE had less than 60% of market share. This is of course a good trend since this browser is obsolete, buggy and doesn’t follow the standards. Plus it’s hard to make cross-browser sites look the same and it’s usually IE’s fault. The fastest growing is actually Google Chrome which might in fact overpower firefox in a few years. That is all good news, even though microsoft is working on HTML5 supporting IE9, they’ll probably be at 50% in two years.

Google vs Microsoft myth – the bigger they get the less creative they become? Not!

Posted on May 5, 2010 by IdeaMonster

I was always wondering that for most big brands there comes a moment when they become less creative and more profit driven. Sure both microsoft and google are both big, both still generate large profits. So is it time for them to stop being creative? Apparently not quite. Google despite being “evil-is-not-evil” does a lot of useful things for people that just work. And mostly for free. Microsoft sells products in shiny packages, but there’s not much backing all of that up. Or is there?

Apparently money is just a factor, not a turning point. And we’re talking BIG money here. So google still hires good creative directors that can come up with ads and ideas that are original. Like this google chrome ad below. This is just awesome in its simplicity and the coolness-factor.