Microsoft Launches PC vs. Mac Site

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It’s been almost two years since Microsoft’s laughable, misleading and creatively bereft “I’m A PC” ads, and you’d think they’d have learned something about appearing too defensive… but no! Right in time for the annual “Back to School” laptop sales wars, Microsoft has launched an official PC vs. Mac section on their website.

Needless to say, it’s laughably misleading.

Under “Compatibility,” for example, Microsoft states:

Plain and simple, if you’re a PC user, lots of your favorite stuff just might not work on a Mac. With PCs outselling Macs 10 to 1, the reality is that most computer software is developed to run on PCs.

What this propaganda ignores, of course, is that every modern Mac is a PC, perfectly capable of booting into Windows to accommodate the infinitesimally small number of programs and file types without native Mac analogues. Unless you go through a complicated hacking process, though, you simply can’t boot into OS X on your PC if someone, say, sends you an iMovie project.

Here’s some more disingenuousness:

Things just don’t work the same way on Macs if you’re used to a PC. For example, the mouse works differently. And many of the shortcuts you’re familiar with don’t work the same way on a Mac.

Well, by that token, many of the shortcuts I’m familiar with on a Mac don’t work under Windows… at least without remember that I need to switch the Command key for the Alt key. That’s hardly rocket science. And despite this rhetoric, my Microsoft laser mouse will attest that any mouse you care to plug into your Mac will work just fine and indistinguishably to if it were plugged into a PC.

In essence, Microsoft’s message is simple: “Change is scary. It’s better to stay with a crappy product you already know than spend a couple of hours transitioning to something superior.” This is head-in-the-sand talk, guys. How much market share does Apple need to take from Microsoft before they start being progressive instead of defensive?

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