The blogosphere has been jolted anew with Microsoft’s latest foray in its new ad campaign. Here we meet Lauren, who has been told she can have any laptop she wants, so long as it’s under a thousand dollars. I won’t recap the whole thing, as it’s only a minute long, and worth watching regardless of whether you’re a Mac or PC.

What’s interesting to me about this campaign in general, and with this latest ad in particular, is just how ordinary Microsoft is willing to have Windows appear. It’s as though Apple is saying “I’m better than the rest,” while Microsoft is saying “yeah, but there are more of us.” With Apple, you choose to be different. With Microsoft, you choose not to be. This is the crux of my longheld opinion regarding most Microsoft products in general.

Take Internet Explorer. We all recall the hot water Microsoft found itself in for its bundling of IE and its subsequent destruction of Netscape. During those first great browser wars, Netscape found itself in the unenviable position of selling a product that didn’t come with your brand new PC to replace the free product whose icon was already on the desktop. We can argue features and functionality left and right, but “free” is an incredibly strong economic aphrodisiac, followed closely by “easy.” This one-two punch was something with which Netscape simply couldn’t compete, and Navigator died a long, painful death. ¹

When an individual or organization chooses to purchase a Mac, it’s almost never spur of the moment. First-time Mac buyers are typically curious about the platform and often feel that Windows is more work than it’s worth. This was exactly the position I was in several years ago when I pre-ordered a top of the line PowerMac G5. I had been learning Java in school, and was doing all of my programming in Eclipse on Windows XP. At the time, I’d been intrigued by the gorgeous design of the tower, and Apple’s claims of performance were very interesting. In addition, I’d been fooling around with Linux, and the idea of using a *nix as my desktop machine was very enticing.

Every switcher has his or her reasons for doing so, but every single one of us made the calculated decision to buy that first Mac. What Microsoft is attempting to do with this latest ad is classic misdirection. They point to the cost and talk about features, completely neglecting actual functionality. They speak like all 17″ screens are created equal, but we all know that isn’t the case. Anyone who’s ever purchased a TV knows that, and the same goes for the rest of the kit. Not all hardware is engineered to the same level of precision, and not all hardware includes the same quality components. Having 4GB of RAM means fairly little if the unit in question has integrated graphics. It also says nothing of durability, or for that matter, weight.

There’s nothing wrong with buying an HP laptop, but Microsoft is missing the mark if they’re trying to convince us that Macs are simply too expensive. For this ad campaign to really succeed, Microsoft needs to change the way we think about PCs. The stock Windows-based PC is the default in the same way that Internet Explorer is the default web browser. People neither choose Windows nor do they choose Internet Explorer. Those are simply defaults. When people start choosing Windows over Mac OS X, Microsoft will have succeeded. Until then, they’re just blowing smoke.

If there were a 17″ MacBook available for under a grand, I’m fairly certain Lauren wouldn’t have bought that HP. The Apple Store is the first place she went. The funny part is that a cheap 17″ laptop is a very low-margin piece of kit. I wonder how many of them HP would have to sell to make the profit Apple extracts from a single MacBook.

1. Ironically, Firefox – born of the ashes of Netscape Navigator – now commands a much larger marketshare than any single version of Internet Explorer. ↩