I thought Apple’s I’m a Mac ad campaign was amusing, but I’m not impressed with Microsoft’s belated I’m a PC response. When Apple claimed that cool people use Macs, it was lame to respond that some PC users are cool too.
PC users don’t identify with their operating system the way Mac users do. PC users don’t put Windows logos on cars, much less on their bodies, for example. (Maybe some do, but they’re less common.)
This was inevitable, and it has little to do with Apple and Microsoft per se. In any industry, when one vendor has a 95% market share, they’re forced into a position being all things to all people and making a lot of people moderately happy, or at least not unhappy. And when another vendor has a 5% market share, they have to make that 5% very happy. The minority vendor can be hip and scrappy; the majority vendor cannot.
Maybe a better response to “I’m a Mac” would have been “I’m not an operating system,” poking fun at people who identify strongly with their computer.
Amusingly enough, a guy I went to school with got the four-color Windows logo tattooed on his shoulder, in permanent ink.
He wasn’t just a user, though — he spent some time working at Microsoft, and considered it enough of a milestone in his life that he got the tattoo.
Personally, I’m not even happy with logos on my clothing.