The silhouettes and imagined dystopia of work was bad. Images of real people prioritizing their Merchandise Update over their family on a Skype call is just fucking horrendous.
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The silhouettes and imagined dystopia of work was bad. Images of real people prioritizing their Merchandise Update over their family on a Skype call is just fucking horrendous.
GeeIWonder
on 07 Dec 13Looks to me like a family coordinating a Christmas or birthday gift. Classic John Lewis. Unless he or she are the equipment manager for a football team, that is.
But yeah, your interpretation is much more in line with your preconceived idea. So that must be what the message is.
I think their video ads are better anyhow. But heck I’m just a negative nancy.
Stefan
on 07 Dec 13I don’t agree with your way of thinking on that ad or the other MS ads. To me they just say “Work, whenever or wherever you want. The choice is up to you.” Stuff like dystopia and so on, it just seems like overthinking something simple.
Anything which gives the choice back to me is not a dystopia.
Ross Campbell
on 07 Dec 13I already hate checking my email ninety times a day … and especially when the “work” day should be over. You know, that time of day where we’re supposed to be able to relax and spend time with our loved ones! Having our work technologies “on” all day long has always felt like a leash. But maybe I’m misinterpreting the above ad. Maybe they’re taking a stroll through the woods “during” the work day. In which case, how dare that gentleman spend quality time with his family.
Jesper
on 07 Dec 13This is getting ridiculous. I agree with the previous commenters.
I can agree that advertising taking a minute from the kid’s soccer game to work on that presentation is a bit grim. But this one changes completely once you see this as being during work hours instead of after work.
Taking a walk in the woods with your kid and bringing the tablet to Skype mom who’s stuck at work doesn’t seem all that dystopic to me. (It seems more inconvenient than anything else, but I’m not the one selling tablets.) Now, if he was actually browsing slides while doing that, sure, that’s pretty bad, but that’s a lot of work to ignore your kid. I don’t see how the family is worse off than when dad is holed up in his office, whereever that may be, working on that presentation.
With regards to work-life balance, we know 37signals puts in four solid work days a week – do any of you turn everything else off outside of those hours? Pick up the book “The Seven-Day Weekend”. It’s about a Brazilian company where, among many things, set working hours are abolished and about the employees, all of them, getting to decide for themselves where and when they do their work. The same people describe taking days off to be with their kids and getting stuff done on Sundays.
Microsoft is certainly not the first to the party and should be awarded no credits as innovators, but you’re spit-balling the same basic philosophy that will bring freedom back to people’s lives. It’s not that you should be available for 40 hours and on call the other 128 hours of the week, it’s that you should be able to pick and choose where to work. And if you want to go work in a forest, with or without your kid, I’ve got a bunch of more fitting labels for that than industrial age butt-in-seat oppression.
Jeff Putz
on 07 Dec 13As much as I see your point of view as the “right” one in many cases, especially with regard to remote work, you fill in way too much context on these ads to suit your point of view.
Tony
on 07 Dec 13I agreed with your previous post about the Microsoft ads (which was really just a way for you to continue to promote your book of course).
But everyone commenting here is right – there is no context for this ad. Are you saying its better to ignore your family while working? Isn’t it better to go to the park with your kid and pay the price by spending a few minutes working there, then be holed up at home and say ‘no I’m working’? Microsoft is easy to bash, but, come on, it isn’t necessary to bash them just for the sake of it.
Of course the quality of posts, comments, and comment moderation has dropped since the blog redesign which has become focused on ‘this is my idea’ rather than ‘this is my idea, what do you think’.
Taras
on 08 Dec 13David, Hell yeah.
Microsoft is absolutely saying that working whilst you’re with your family is more important to them. That was my first thought when I saw the ad. What does our future hold if we can’t unplug and enjoy living even for a few minutes?
Chris
on 08 Dec 131. Who’s holding the camera for the dad and kid? The angle doesn’t seem to work for a tablet’s camera. 2. The wife/mother is clearly working on PowerPoint, not shopping, as GeeIWonder said. 3. My guess is the two of them just called in to say hello and she happens to be working on a presentation at the same time, possibly while on a business trip or something.
Des
on 08 Dec 13Honestly, I am sick of these posts. MS products are way more useful than yours, build something that is of equal value and you have the right to comment otherwise shut it!
Berserk
on 08 Dec 13The telephone considered harmful? Imagine a world where people talk/write into a device instead of interacting with the people around them.
I’d say Apple is leading that march way more than Microsoft.
Anonymous Coward
on 08 Dec 13Seems like David’s point is that the split screen is the wrong message? If you want to talk to your husband/wife/kid during work time, then dedicate yourself to that. Don’t give them 50% of your attention while your spreadsheet or presentation fills the other half of the screen.
Alex
on 08 Dec 13Agree with you 100% David. These ads are a joke! Microsoft shares are going to crash.
Bryan
on 09 Dec 13I think David is right, Microsoft advertising here is mixing the wrong elements. If they want to promote “Work from anywhere”, I don’t agree with showing family in the ad, which they are with the little boy. Maybe show someone clearly working at a picnic table in a park, or something like that.
I pretty much work from anywhere I want and Microsoft is using this advertising to tell me I can use their tools to help me with that. My disconnect with these ads is when I’m working either at home, coffee shop, wherever… I want to be 100% focused on work. That means no interruptions from my wife or kids (unless its urgent).
If I decide to take a couple hours in the afternoon to hang out with my family, all work related computer/phone/tablets get turned off and my family has 100% of my attention. I would never want a solution that allows me to be working and connecting with my family at the same time. That is not fair to my family nor my work.
T
on 09 Dec 13Work in an office, and then you can leave it at work and go home. That’s balance. There’s less balance when you can’t define the lines.
Daryl
on 09 Dec 13I understand that without context you might want to give Microsoft a pass on this particular billboard. But we already know the context from the other marketing materials and Microsoft is clearly trying to push a work everywhere concept. It just comes off poorly, intended or not. Oddly, there are other MS commercials that simply push the interoperability of their traditional office products on their devices and to me that seems like a the best way of marketing the products. We all know we can work everywhere. We don’t want to work everywhere!
Daniel Rose
on 09 Dec 13So your problem is that Microsoft has ads showcasing their products in order to work remotely, from any place, anytime, anywhere?
Joe Sak
on 09 Dec 13It should say “Honestly, I will work whenever they want me to.”
GeeIWonder
on 09 Dec 13This is a John Lewis ad, for a Nokia product (available at JL ‘exclusively’) that runs Microsoft Windows.
At best it is a partial Microsoft billboard.
Marko Schulz
on 10 Dec 13Strange: These ads tout “we enable you to work outside the office”, but none says “we enable you to do private things when in the office”.
[email protected]
on 12 Dec 13The picture in the ad seems to show a screen which is split 50:50 between a Skype call and a business-looking document/chart.
It’s interesting that you interpret this as one side of the screen being prioritised over the other.
When I look at the picture I see a user who’s happily taking a bit of their working day to take a call from their family over Skype.
For a lot of people, that’s a flexible working environment that they could only dream of.
:-)
Matt
on 12 Dec 13Similar to Chris, am I only one seeing that the ad doesn’t work when studied…
The right hand side seems to show the arm of the man on the left, yet in the inset ‘self’ camera view you can see he’s holding the kid with both arms… I’d simply ask what on earth I am meant to understand that ad to be suggesting to me about what is possible… Is that if I grow a 3rd arm I can use a tablet to work from anywhere? Is a tablet capable of split screen exclusively a Mircosoft thing?
This discussion is closed.