Imsai arasan 23am Pulikesi a.k.a Microsoft Windows 7

A person would have to be stone deaf AND blind as a bat in order to have missed the slew of advertisements Microsoft has been flooding the telly with over the past couple of months, with the launch of Windows 7. Even then, said person with said weaknesses would have had to be completely cut off from a TV/Radio/News paper to have missed these ads. In other words, the only person who could've missed these is a hermit doing some good old fashioned tapas in upper reaches of the Himalayas.

The flip side of this analogy is that the audience Microsoft's ads target, spans the spectrum of the human race and a few from the animal kingdom. With such a large target, boy, did Microsoft do a Pulikesi!

Most self respecting Tamilians would have seen Imsai Arasan 23am Pulikesi and would also recall the scene on the bear hunt. The emperor, deserted by his 'loyal' followers when a bear is spotted fires several arrows and misses at point blank range. The bear is insulted by the lack of skill of its foe and, instead of killing Pulikesi, simply spits on him and moves on. An insulted Pulikesi nurses his wounds by taking up shooting classes. A soldier is tasked with holding an apple over his head so the emperor can shoot it. As each soldier dies, the target grows and is eventually replaced by a huge pumpkin, which is also missed! I may have screwed up the narrative above and made it not funny, but this was a massive slap-stick hit and still has me in splits each time I see it. Each time I see it, I also think about how implausible the whole situation is. Until Microsoft proved me wrong.

You see, the target demographic for Microsoft is massive, to say the least. A catchy ad campaign would have to capture a 3 year old and a 75 year old and everyone in between. I'm sorry to say, in classic Pulikesi fashion, Microsoft's missed them all! I have multiple bones to pick with Microsoft:

• what do you mean you got suggestions from users on what they would ACTUALLY like to see in an OS and implemented them in Windows 7? Does that mean for 20 odd years you sat on your high horse and belted out sub-standard products that didn't care about what the user wanted to do? Even if you did, I think it's a pretty big boo-boo to be admitting this every 10 minutes on telly

• one of the key features being touted is that of faster wake-up. Hasn't Apple being doing this for eons now? I can't help but noticing that my 2 year old MacBook wakes up faster than the Toshiba being showcased in the ad for faster wake up!

• a couple of the adverts feature folks being flown all the way from the UK to Tokyo/Houston just to prove the new laptops are capable of 'waking-up faster' and they are better at gaming! Each of these adverts include a limo ride to the airport in the UK, a flight to Tokyo/Houston and a gas-guzzling 4x4 ferrying the passenger from the airport to Toshiba/Dell, as the case may be. Come on Microsoft, the whole world's in a recession, you have climate change and environment friendliness being bandied about more often than Kate Moss's drunken charades or Amy Winehouse's drug-fuelled antics and here you advertise that you proudly brought a person across the world just to open a freaking laptop? Know your audience Microsoft, is that so hard?

• scriptwriters for the adverts could do with being more creative. If you want to showcase people friendliness, focus on the larger issues and club the smaller ones into a single ad for heaven's sake! Why, oh why, would you want to waste 30 seconds of precious prime-time screen real estate by having one irritating advertisement that says your new OS can arrange windows or the task bar is simple to use (again, stuff that Macs have been doing since the dawn of time!)

It's not so much an argument about the superiority of Windows over Apple's Mac OS or vice-versa. Windows 7, by Microsoft's own admission, has just become more like a Mac to use. It's as simple as that. Some changes that ought to have been done years ago, are being done now and there is nothing wrong with that, better late than never and all that. Look at Mac adverts, they are clean, simple, devoid of loud music or ignorant users (who, by the way, feel proud that they suggested something the Mac has been doing all along!), straight to the point and focussed on the features. No wonder you have fewer adverts for the Mac than Windows and no wonder again that an upgrade from Mac OS X Leopard to Mac OS X Snow Leopard costs £30 compared to £120 for an upgrade from Vista/XP to 7 - Microsoft needs the cash to fund the ads!

The ads end with, "I'm a PC and Windows 7 was my idea!". I guess PC here stands for Puli(c)kesi...