A note to readers. I realised after writing this that using the words “Wow” and “campaign” so close to each other was probably a bad idea. To any World of Warcraft players in the audience, you can turn back now; I’ve got nothing for you.

Apple has really good marketing. However, given the recent Photosynth demo given at TED (available for viewing and download on that site) it’s pretty clear that Microsoft has a good idea of where computers need to be headed and they have really smart people working on it. People say that all Microsoft does nowadays is buy up new technologies, but even if every piece of interesting code that came out of Microsoft was from outside acquisitions, they’d still be showing their foresight in buying the technologies that really can change the way users interact.

Unfortunately, they have really shitty marketing. Now, I was one of the few people who thought that the “Wow” campaign for Vista was pretty interesting; they weren’t the best commercials I’d ever seen but they definitely got me interested. Having noted that, Windows has a pretty lousy track record with engendering interest through marketing in recent years and the fatal flaw they carry with each new advertisement is at the core of the “Wow” campaign. Microsoft tries to instill its products with a sense of awe for public consumption.

Apple’s recent iPhone ads show the exact opposite. Besides being very simple in presentation, their content is itself simple and easily relatable. Where Windows shows someone experiencing the Great Wall of China for the first time, Apple shows you a person using Safari on a cell phone. They have trouble expressing to users the reasons they should be excited about software. This goes back to one of the subtle, implied but not described, points I had about Microsoft in an earlier post. Microsoft likes developers. They understand developers so most of their publicizing efforts go towards informing developers of the new features available to them. They can sell new technologies to developers because they know what to say and what to show to get them interested.

So what does this discourse on marketing have to do with Photosynth? Microsoft really sucks at marketing. That simple 5 minute tech demo is more interesting than everything they shoved into Vista and has instant appeal to users. And the silence is deafening. I know that the software is still under development and there are bugs. I’m not expecting that they continue to release buggy software and patch it later. But they were touting Vista (back when it was Longhorn) for it’s new fantastic features and most of them didn’t even make it into Vista. (In particular their new WinFS file system – ostensibly NTFS with a database layer for enhanced searching – was to revolutionize how users search and interact with their data and the project has been shelved. Not delayed, shelved. Some of it’s features will be available in Windows Server 2007 which users won’t use because it’s a server.)

These two things are the two failings of Microsoft when it comes to marketing and, paradoxically, they are contradictory. Microsoft is too humble and too brash at the same time. They promise advanced features they cannot deliver within their deadlines and they create fantastic software which is spoken of in whispers and only to a select few. This simple tech demo is more intriguing than anything Microsoft puts on TV. I know that I’m a developer, so I speak with a forked tongue on this topic, but even if I weren’t, I would still think SeaDragon (The rendering technology behind Photosynth) is one of the most impressive pieces of software I’ve ever seen. This piece of software is one of those rare occasions when developers and users alike will look at it and say “Wow.” And nobody knows.