After all, Microsoft is still #1 in the market, and this campaign was entirely unnecessary as such. (Honestly, if you’re already #1, recognizing and addressing your #2 in an ad campaign is simply acknowledging your slipping hold on the market and empowering your competition. You are helping them promote their brand more than you are promoting your own brand, especially if there is already a huge community of supporters for said brand.) Regardless, they decided to run with it anyway, received some negative feedback on the campaign direction, and now Microsoft’s move is being discussed all over the internet by Apple, Linux, and PC-lovers alike. Aside from getting a little dirt associated with its name (honestly, who hasn’t had this happen?), Microsoft’s campaign perhaps did not succeed in the way it had hoped to succeed, but definitely has accumulated the kind of publicity that most would call successful.

Regardless, the current buzz around Microsoft’s negatively-received campaign and the bashing will soon be old news, and sales should not be hindered by this campaign. The only downside I can see is, aside from increased publicity, they are several million in the hole without increased sales. But who knows, maybe all they were going for was the publicity.

“Blogs: We reach out to individuals who run relevant blogs and actually pay them to post our embedded videos. Sounds a little bit like cheating/PayPerPost, but it’s effective and it’s not against any rules.”

If it was an ad by Ask, they might have hosted the video themselves so that it would be posted on non-tech-related blogs. This one will mainly reach a techie crowd, and is thus an advertisement for TechCrunch.com and Jason Kincaid. Which is Fine! Technologists like us are not naive.

I don’t think they are doing Pay Per Post.

what – to look like and walk like a hoe?