Vitor Rodrigues

It is a generally accepted idea that Apple has a fantastic marketing team. We see their ads, their launch parties, their website, their design, and we almost want to buy the product just because it looks cool, nice and great, but we didn’t even try it yet. Today I was surprised by another company’s marketing ideas. Believe it or not, it was Microsoft and it’s Vista marketing campaign! I should say that I know nothing about Vista, besides the fact that was launched this week and that was being developed for a long time. I still have no curiosity in learn about it or its new features, since I don’t plan to use it in a near future.

To the official Vista’s launch in Toronto, Microsoft built a very cool ice house. The house has been a huge attraction in downtown Toronto, and the house visitors have the opportunity to see the the new msft OS and Office packages in action. This was a great way of calling people and try to impose the “coolness” factor. I checked the house today from the outside and it looks cool. I will try to visit the inside part tomorrow to see how does a ice toilet works!

Despite the factor of the ice house being a huge attraction by itself, the location chosen (the same used by Sony for the recent launch of the PS3) was also very good. It was just outside the main entrance of the Toronto Eaton Centre, that is just the biggest shopping mall in Toronto (and the 3rd biggest in Canada), and currently Toronto’s top tourist attraction regarding number of visitors. What best location can you have to demo a product than a place where all the families go and most of the tourists also go?

After checking out the ice house, I decided to stop and the Indigo store inside the mall to read some magazines and look at the bargain books (sometimes you find really great value in there). And what was my surprise when I looked at the “Hot & New” section at the entrance, and it was all about Vista! There were more than 10 different books on Vista, from the Bible to the Idiots series. That I was not expecting, but I should say that it was also a good strategy. While I was reading a magazine close to the Vista stand, I would see people stopping and looking at the Vista books with plenty of interest and commenting about it. They definitely caught people’s attention to their product launch.

And at the end I came home thinking: if only Linux had an opportunity like this…

In other news: I gave a try to GIMP 2.3.14 and it rocks! Some very good new features. More on that soon.

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This entry was posted on Friday, February 2nd, 2007 at 11:20 pm and is filed under Canada, News, Software. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.