Note to Microsoft: join up sales & marketing!
If MS really wants to be seen as a credible enterprise technology supplier it's going to have to work a lot harder than it has done in the production of the recent Office ads, now showing pretty much everywhere on billboards/TV as far as I can tell.
In case you haven't seen them, they depict groups of supposedly professional businesspeople (these are the people who fund purchases of Office, btw) as bumbling dinosaurs. Hmm. (Tim Bray gives a bit more of a prosaic response
here.)
But from Microsoft's point of view this should be seen as a double whammy: not only do the ads insult the very people that will likely help to drive sales (never a good idea, but unfortunately more common than it should be) - but there's a whole group of people at MS doing great work with customers, demonstrating the business value of "information worker" technology. These people really get it, and are helping customers to see how they can use productivity and collaboration tools to really make their businesses more productive and responsive. These ads are completely counterproductive. MS says that its new focus is on "demonstrating business value" of its technology to "business decision makers" but these ads just demean them and misunderstand the challenge.
MS Scorecard here: 1/10. Must try harder.
