"I'm a PC" debuts

OK, we all know Windows is a huge success, but consider the following facts and figures. Despite years of expensive advertising, Apple still controls less than 4 percent of the worldwide market for PC sales. Meanwhile, the Windows division at Microsoft generated almost $17 billion in revenues in the company's most recent fiscal year, with profits of more than $13 billion. That means that operating margin for Windows is, get this, a whopping 77 percent. Put another way, the Windows business is a license to print money.

But the future is ever unfolding and today's dominant product could be tomorrow's also-ran. In late 2007, Microsoft banded together a team to explore the future for Windows. Working under this codename FTP168 (for Free The People 24 X 7), this team began exploring how it could communicate all of the things that were possible using Windows on a PC, on the Web, and with a smart phone. The idea is that while the Windows experience today largely occurs on the PC, that won't always be the case. And various product teams at Microsoft are racing to ensure that Windows on the Web, and on mobile devices, is as useful and exciting as its more traditional PC brethren.

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“I’m a PC” – Community, Not Competition
Another major element of this next phase of the Windows marketing initiative is a series of television and Web ads called “Real PC”. The ads feature a diverse group of faces representing the one billion people who use Windows PCs worldwide, all celebrating the sense of power and community Windows enables by declaring: “I’m a PC.” The ads will feature green architect Edouard Francois, astronaut Bernard Harris and celebrities such as Eva Longoria and Deepak Chopra, but the main focus is on real PC users of all ages and from all walks of life, such as teachers, cabbies, designers and fish mongers.

Veghte describes how Windows users can join the community by creating their own spots. “One of the really fun things we’ve done is to create a series of ads called ‘I’m a PC’--and we’re enabling every PC user to upload their own I’m a PC spot,” he says. “So you can upload it and we’ll publish it and amplify it on windows.com … and then we’ll do better than that – we’ll publish some of those I’m a PC spots in places like digital billboards in Times Square.”