Dear me... another bizarre promo from Microsoft

What do you do if you're Microsoft, and has released a product that's really quite good but perhaps not as stunningly great as to persuade customers with older versions to upgrade to it?

I'm not talking about Vista versus XP, but Office 2007. I've used it for a while now, and can honestly say that if you get it, you won't be disappointed. There's lots to like in Office 2007 and it probably does make you more productive too.

However, Office 2003 wasn't that bad either. Or, should I say, isn't that bad, because Microsoft's toughest competitor in the productivity suites arena is as in operating systems... its earlier versions. It's a hard sell basically to get people to shift from older versions of Office to the brand-spanking new Ribbonesque '07 model. Apart from the nice new interface there's for normal users nothing that makes them go "wow" and buy Office 2007, and that's a big problem for Microsoft.

I was wondering how Microsoft would go about marketing Office 2007 actually. Last year, I spoke to Jensen Harris at Microsoft, the guy in charge of the interface redesign. He explained rather well the thinking behind the new interface and rattled off research figures to back up his claims - people become more productive with Office 2007 which is good, mmkay?

Jensen didn't tell me that there was a "viral" in the works though... perhaps for a reason. It's called The Enchanted Office (no, really) and it's a web comic. I think it's meant to be you know... light-hearted and funny, but to push the marketing message as well. Of course, in doing so, Enchanted Office ends up being cringe-making and embarrassing.

Oh well. It could've been worse. At least MS refrained from using Ballmer this time.



Whoever put the site together for Microsoft can't have used the excellent spelling checker in Office 2007... many of the URLs in the "favourite this" section don't work because they are spelt wrong:

"Post http://www.echantedoffice.com"
www.echantedoffice.com
title="Post http://www.echantedoffice.com"
www.echantedoffice.com
A title="Post http://www.echantedoffice.com
url=http://www.echantedoffice.com

Update Looks like the typos above have been fixed now :)
Via Joe Wilcox's Microsoft Watch


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