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Microsoft is currently running a television ad campaign called “To The Cloud”. In the commercial called “Airport” (seen below) a couple is stranded at the airport because of a flight delay. The man then says, “To The Cloud” and pulls up a television show they recorded at home. Magically they watch a fictious show called "Celebrity Probation’. The woman says, "Yeah cloud.”

The problem with this use-case is that it has nothing to do with The Cloud. This couple is just connecting remotely to their home PC. Any number of products have done this for several years. There is GoToMyPC, Back to My Mac (introduced with OS X 10.5) among others. Microsoft seems so desperate to be relevant these days, they are claiming things about Windows 7 that have nothing to do with The Cloud. In this commercial there is no real connection between The Cloud and watching a TV show recorded on a home computer.

The other commerical in this campaign is called “Family Photo”.

In this ad Mom is trying to take a nice family photo. She's got everyone together on the couch, dressed all alike, but all of her photos have one or several people not smiling or doing something else. She then says the magic incantation, “To The Cloud.” All of a sudden she can use her finger to replace the faces of her kids and husband with better ones from.... well somewhere. We're supposed to think,

• The Cloud let's her use her finger instead of a mouse to edit.
• Photo editing software runs better in The Cloud than on her PC.
• The good photos are either generated by The Cloud, Windows 7 or from some other magical place (maybe Narnia?).

Finally, she presses the Facebook button to share with successful photo her friends (hopefully we all understand Microsoft didn't invent Facebook either).

The bottom line is once again Microsoft hopes people are just stupid, or at best ignorant, and have no idea what "The Cloud" is. These commercials are a sad attempt to persuade people that Windows 7 and The Cloud are one in the same. If you want to be hip and cool by using The Cloud, you must get Windows 7 to do so. This ads follow a long list of failed campaigns (Jerry Seinfeld, I'm a PC, Laptop Hunters with Lauren, etc.) that did nothing to improve Microsoft's image or sales. With each new campaign, all we really learn is how out of touch (and behind) Microsoft continues to be. 

If Microsoft had been around in the 1960's they probably would've run an ad campaign called, "To The Moon" to promote their lame operating system.

9 Comments

1. Randall Phar ~ January 10, 2011 18:19
   There is no "cloud." Try this: substitute the phrase "someone else's servers" for the phrase "the Cloud" whenever you discuss the idea of "cloud computing." For example, imagine a business person saying the following: "For efficiency, and to save money, my company is moving our important data and processes to the Cloud." Now substitute the phrases: "For efficiency, and to save money, my company is moving our important data and processes to someone else's servers." Totally different impact. The phrase "the Cloud" is meant to sound innocuous, friendly, and fun, in order to hide what is really going on: the dumbing down and capitulation of the computing public.
2. Michael ~ January 11, 2011 04:19
   I agree. Both of the commericals show nothing new regarding Windows 7. The second one even moreso. Why go to "the cloud" when I can fire up Photoshop and grab the pic from my HDD faster? BTW, the "cloud" doesn't do photo editing. Ugggh these ads make me cringe.
3. falco ~ January 11, 2011 12:04
   Really... I mean REALLY bad....
4. Robert ~ January 13, 2011 13:49
   Please. Microsoft isn't the only company pushing the cloud in questionable ways. Stop the Win7 hate.
5. Duh ~ February 12, 2011 01:35
   Is 'the cloud' some kind of girl wrestling tv show? Wtf is this stupid commercial trying to promote? Advertising dimwits at play!
6. Sky ~ March 1, 2011 22:48
   All that's happened is that someone in the Microsoft marketing team heard someone talk about cloud computing as they passed in the hallway, and decided to use that term in their adverts. I'm surprised that these adverts got authorised by management to be shown on TV. They're relying on the ignorance and/or lack of knowledge of the average TV viewer for these to work.
7. clamboslice ~ March 11, 2011 04:47
   These ads are truly idiotic and awful. What is microsoft selling here? Consider the airport ad. The couple is bored, stuck in an airport and the ugly woman is strangely manlike. Whatever the product or service is, I have a bad feeling already and hate it. Then, the ad with the family group photo. Who in the world wants to bother with this kind of photo and why is it easier to use software than to just shoot a ton of digital photos and keep the good one? This ad shows you using the wrong effort to get a desired result, a good photo. I hear Microsoft is making cool mice and webcams these days however.
8. Craig ~ March 16, 2011 15:34
   Cloud computing is similar to the old powerful server and dumb client machine setup where most of the computationally expensive tasks were performed by the server. It just wasn’t feasible from a financial and technical point of view at the time for everyone to have a powerful individual computer. Nowadays computing is generally much cheaper and the technology has moved on so much that quite often our client machines are extremely powerful and affordable on their own. As a result the emphasis on cloud computing has obviously moved to highlight some other potential advantages, other than power and cost, that can be gained from it. The availability of the Internet has also given it a new lease of life: - - It should be easier to administer a product in the cloud e.g. the client machines whilst very powerful are almost acting as just dumb terminals for input/output when using a service from the cloud. When a business releases an update to a product every client also gets this update immediately. - There is the convenience of storage and access to a service anywhere provided you have an Internet connection. - It should also be easier to build in reliability (think backups) and easier to make use of parallel computing. - There are still cost benefits e.g. if you want more storage or increased performance simply upgrade the machines in the cloud. Obviously there are many disadvantages to cloud computing (e.g. no Internet connection will probably render a lot of these services useless) but Microsoft would be better off advertising these actual potential benefits in some way rather than completely misleading the public by shouting “to the cloud!” whenever they seemingly feel like it in reference to their own products. Whilst I haven’t tried the photo editing software shown in the advert presumably it is just launched from a website? The actual photo editing is probably still done on the local machine anyway so I’m not sure how this really differs from loading up Photoshop. Even if the actual image manipulation is done by the server it’s still going to be a hell of a lot quicker and less clunky editing the photo locally than it is to upload several photos for processing to a server first. Maybe it’s the “convenient” Facebook button that makes this cloud computing in Microsoft’s eyes or just because it uses the Internet in some fashion. Furthermore even if the photo editing advert was legitimately advertising an example of cloud computing why does the family require a new PC to perform this task? If anything cloud computing should in theory reduce the need for a powerful client machine. The only reason they need a new PC is to be able to use a touch screen instead of a mouse. Personally I would much rather use a mouse instead of obscuring what I am trying to edit with my fingers and hand.
9. Anonymous ~ August 16, 2011 03:21
   *Q: Among all the products that Apple has manufactured, including the iPod, the iPhone, the iPad, and the MacBook, why is there not a printer in the mix? A: Because nothing Apple does is worth printing.* Windows 7 is not as bad as one may think. Just because Microsoft has its flaws doesn't mean that Apple does not; Even Linux has its own flaws. Any other possible technological company(-ies) out there involved with computer technologies have their flaws. The technology involved with building computers and operating systems will never be perfect. There will always be viruses, there will always be not-thought-of features, and there will always be such a thing as a faster computer. Therefore, all in all in general, every computer or operating system that exists sucks, because the perfect computer/OS will never exist.

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