Advertising, ad campaigns, ad agencies, and the people that make it happen

One of the unsolved mysteries of the universe is the continuing success of Microsoft as a company. Yes, I know it is the uber/juggernaut of marketing and will go to any extreme to eliminate its competition. Yet even I am more than surprised to read in yesterday’s Slashdot (essential reading for anyone remotely geekified) that up to 60% of the code in the consumer version of Microsoft’s new “Vista” operating system will have to be rewritten as the Company "scrambles" to fix internal problems. Apparently in an effort to meet a deadline of the 2007 CES show (which is a year from now!) programmers have been yanked off the highly successful Xbox team to help resolve way too many problems. I look forward to McCann Erickson’s ad campaign, replete with dinosaurs, lap dancers and what ever other stupid visual metaphors they manage to come up with to explain yet another 12 month delayed Microsoft product release.

The thing I love about this picture is that everyone in it looked older then than they do now. But, they are a hell of a lot richer!