Windows Home Server: perfect family, joyful children and Macbook sold seperately

Ramping up to the ‘official’ launch of Windows Home Server, the WHS mini-site got a minor refresh today with a subtle new visual style, some additional resources and links. Besides the site still lacks the most fundamental information including specification and screenshots, it’s worth noting the interesting choice of stock photography.

Windows Home Server website
Windows Home Server website
Windows Home Server website
Windows Home Server website

Life is perfect with Windows Home Server. I mean just look at the third picture, the family looks so happy in their sunburnt living-room of a house designed to spec from an Ikea catalogue. The kid is having so much fun throwing his bear, the wife has time to read a book, and the husband surfing away on his trademark white Apple Macbook.

21 insightful thoughts

  1. Nice find of the Apple Macbook Long! I don’t get why Microsoft’s marketing always involves happy people and not a glimpse of their own products in action. Even the MS iPod packaging spoof released early this year proves this point when they stick a human seemingly enjoying his music.

  2. That made me laugh, seriously though this just shows whats wrong with Microsoft’s marketing department not having a clue on how to sell a product, it’s like whoever is running the show just doesn’t care about the product and resorts to some generic corporate template.

    Why they continue with that stuff is beyond me you would have thought they would have gotten their marketing act together now.

  3. So this isn’t the first time Microsoft uses Apple products in advertisements. They must be stupid, seriously. And if they show their own products in action, than it’s mostly a beta version with old icons (like in the official Vista videos) or they start competitions where you should create a video by using Windows Media Center (!!!).

  4. well it demonstrates that you can use WHS also happily with your macbook? not that stupid imo and lets be honest – its so much unimportant for the sales.

  5. As Marco said, this is not surprising since its one of the toted features of WHS, the ability to backup Macs also. Also, the MacBooks run Intel x86 processors and would even make a good Home Server itself since WHS does not require powerful hardware. Also, for those who are using BootCamp to dual boot XP/Vista on their MacBook, you qualify for backup under WHS.

    So this post is probably bit over sensationalized.

  6. Ok, I have 2 questions:
    1. why do you think it is a macbook? The pic is so small I cannot see the Apple logo. Are you implying that all white laptops are from Apple? I don’t think so. Some companies sell white laptops as well (I am not sure for the company names, but I believe Sony and BenQ etc once sold white laptops)

    2. Why such a fuss about MS using Apple things? If you see the adv on “why you love mac” thing on street or on Apple website, they list: macs run microsoft office; macs even run Windows; and “Even more reasons to get a Mac” if you want to “upgrading to Vista”…

  7. “perfect family, joyful children and Macbook sold seperately”
    Ah, yes I heard the Microsoft Joyful Child 2007 Ultimate Edition would ship later this year.

    Oh, and Long… don’t knock IKEA. (Ever.)

  8. That’s one of the things that Microsoft does wrong with ads – the use of ‘real people’.

    Just because an ad has a real person in it, doesn’t make me want it, no matter how beautiful or ugly they look. Whether it’s a pop star to a geek, using ads with real people is subjective to what each individual thinks.

    It also takes away from the point of the ad – to sell a product/service. If people are criticizing about the ad, more than what’s it selling, the purpose is lost and wasted.

    You can never go wrong with a graphical icon/logo. But real people are too subjective to put in. Unfortunately, tons of Microsoft ads or backgrounds contain real people put in them.

  9. Well, I liked their People Ready commercials. They were fairly naturalistic, and they had friggin’ Dr. Crusher in them!

  10. You sure it isn’t a Toshiba Portege? We have loads of them floating around in the Windows group. I would rather use a good laptop, but some do like them

  11. How do you know it’s a macbook?

    Do you have some specialized software that analyzed the image, and identified it as a macbook?

    Or do you think that a white laptop can only possibly be a macbook?

    Even if it was a macbook, why would it matter?

  12. Just for the record, Asus sells a white laptop, as they are the makers of the Macbook. Difference being they sell theirs with Windows.

  13. Too many shiny happy people and not enough substance.
    http://get.live.com/ is full of stock photos that have nothing to do with the product too.
    It’s not that it’s a Mac in the photo that’s the problem obviously because WHS is useful for them too, it’s the laziness of the people who just slap up any stock photo without thinking about what it means that’s annoying.

    They really need to start making their adds point to a website with videos of people actually using their products. Nothing beats seeing a product being used by someone who knows every feature and is good at explaining them because something like a “home server” isn’t a product the average user has any clue why it might be useful to them.

  14. Long, this is a post with a title about an Apple MacBook in a Microsoft ad, authored by you. If anyone is over emphasizing here, its you my friend. I just want to clear another thing up. Microsoft started their business developing software for the Macintosh, it was their bread and butter for many, many years. Apps like PPT never made it to Windows until 1990, Excel – ’87. So, regardless we might see 1000 stock photos on Microsoft.com web sites with Apple systems in them, lets not look too deep into it and make something out of obviously nothing. Windows Vista, OS X, Windows XP, Linux, MS Office, Open Office, Mac, PC, they are all good.

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