Apple vs. Microsoft

The "I'm a Mac, and I'm a PC" advertising campaign has always been a little bothersome to me in its snide presentation but I think the November election is infusing the PR group with that little something extra that typically only comes out during dirty political campaigning.

The most recent ads show PC (it's actually Microsoft they're after but whatever) budgeting for Vista's flaws by piling a huge amount of money for advertising and very little to fix the flaws, and then after talking this strategy over with Mac, pushing all the money in to advertising.  This is exactly what I would expect from a dirty political campaign, which knows that you can say pretty much anything in a public advertisement and get away with it even though it's obviously not factual.  I don't have to know a Microsoft programmer to know that Microsoft is spending millions and millions on Vista updates, and I know after using Vista for a year that I haven't run across any of these supposed flaws, which Apple has never actually identified in their commercials, only spoken vaguely about.

I hope that this is the precipice of a backlash over this type of dirty campaigning.  People only have so much tolerance for mudslinging when it starts to ebb into the realm of unreliability and I think Apple is starting to cross that line.

Ultimately, it's the elitist nature of Apple, charging more for their systems than the equivalent PC (running an MS product or linux) that hurts them and keeps their supposedly perfect operating system out of the hands of the masses.  Sure, people have accepted paying $50 extra for a well designed MP3 player, but they're not paying $300 for a new computer, so ultimately Apple is failing.  Instead of trying to scare people into paying more maybe they should make themselves more accessible and see if they remain unblemished with a 20% market share rather than the 8% market share they've been hovering around for years.