Brands Create Customers

BusinessWeek reports that Microsoft has sent design guidelines to PC makers to help them create new PC designs that are worthy of Microsoft Vista, to be launched in 2007. The “how-to” kit specifies preferred design elements (”accelerated curves” and “purposeful contrast”) as well as colors: “Obsidian” black and “Ice” white. According to BW, the guidelines exhort PC makers to create computers that are “objects of pure desire.”

Brand managers at PC makers are already battling stiff currents, but Redmond’s entry into the PC design sphere will send a tidal wave in their direction. Stirring the tea leaves a bit, one can speculate what PC brand managers might be thinking when they get these design kits:

1. #@%$#&*$#%
2. These guidelines imply that Microsoft owns the customer, and that PC makers are simply . . . delivery agents!
3. #@%$#&*$%#
4. We make the box, and they provide the software, but somehow we’re the ingredient brand!!
5. If we follow these guidelines, we will create look-alike PC products
6. Look-alike products will erode what little differentiation we have left
7. Our bargaining leverage with Microsoft will be reduced
8. Our pricing leverage with customers will be reduced
9. We will become supplier brands, pure and simple
10. PC prices will decline—but at our expense, not Microsoft’s
11. Windows Vista will have a slow adoption rate, but Microsoft will blame us for the problem, citing “poor PC design” that fails to enhance Vista
12. Microsoft has a history of competing with its partners
13. Microsoft will blame us for “lack of innovation” in PC design
14. Microsoft will announce a global competition to build a “Microsoft PC” worthy of Vista
15. That PC will be built to Redmond tech specs and design specs, with brutal cost parameters
16. Our suppliers in Asia will fall all over themselves bidding on the contract, worth billions
17. Our supply chains will implode
18. The new Microsoft PC will feature a minimalist, elegant style
19. It might even be “all-in-one” with integrated CPU and monitor—a real design innovation
20. In look feel it will seem just like . . . the Apple Mac!!
21. #@%$#&*$#%

Oy.

This entry was posted on Saturday, July 29th, 2006 at 2:29 pm and is filed under Brand Value. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.