“For marketers … this is actually turning out, in my view, to be an ad-serving machine”
- Kostas Mallios, Microsoft’s general manager for Strategy and Business Development
Back in April, when Apple announced iAd as one of it’s “tent poles” of iOS4, I was pretty ready to just hold for Windows Mobile 7 and see how that looked. I’d had some time to mess with my sisters Zune HD and between that experience, and some of the Win 7 demos I’d seen, I was thinking maybe it was time to make a switch.
Of all the ways Microsoft could have gone after the iPhone – the hardware, the ecosystem, any of it – they pick iAd? The new platform is going by the name Toast for now and the goal is, as stated above, to turn their phones into “an ad-serving machine.” Good lord.
Like Apple, Microsoft is trying to spin this as a feature:
“For consumers, what this means is basically seamless experiences, seamless social connectivity”
Uh, what? On what planet is advertising a seamless, social experience? Advertising by its nature is about disrupting the users experience. It’s about taking them out of whatever they’re doing and saying “hey! look over here!”
What really takes this platform over the top for me is that while iAd is limited to applications, Toast runs in the main OS, serving ads right to the home screen of your phone.
I’m a bit a stuck record on this, but since we’re all here I’ll say it again: display advertising is an artifact of the print and broadcast worlds. It ignores all the best aspects of the web in exchange for showcasing its most boring. Worse, its left huge sections of the digital content economy in shambles, resulting stupid pagination schemes, and user hostile page layouts all designed to squeeze in one more ad. It’s bizarre to me that here on the cusp what should be the next wave of connected systems two companies that should be leading the charge are playing last decades game. I was genuinely hoping Microsoft would come into the mobile space with Win 7 and give Apple something to think about. But if this is how they’re going to do it, what’s the point?
my god…just when you think MS is going to finally get their shit together and make something simple, really good looking and (heaven forbid) user friendly, they go and fuck it all up.
I would really like there to be a serious competitor to the iPhone (andriod is getting close) and i was actually really looking forward to the new windows phone platform. I’m guessing their UI team is none to happy with this decision. I know I wouldn’t be if I had worked so hard to move the look of an aging company toward something youthful and just plain well designed and at the last minute the suits (presumably) walk in and think ‘you know what this would be perfect for? a new ad platform that can generate some REAL dollars’
Well it was a neat idea before the inevitable happened, maybe one day MS will learn.
Right? From the demos I saw – Win 7 actually looked like it might be the real deal.
It reminds me of a project I was on a few years ago. I can’t say who it was, but it was a well know hardware company and the group I was working with had outlined a 5 year plan to basically create their own, somewhat Apple-like, hardware/software ecosystem. Obviously super ambitious, but no unattainable. As we were about to roll out the first two products, the “partner marketing” group got wind of things and managed to load the products up with applications (and the requisite stickers) until it was basically just another bloated machine. After about a year of going down this road, the entire system was killed on the basis that at this point, the machines were just like all the companies offerings, so why no roll it all in the main product line. So sad.
This kind of thing happens all the time too. I can’t help but wonder how many actually great products have been dreamt up within companies like Microsoft only to be watered down into partner marketing machines.