“I have a Mac… And I am proud of it.” Seems to be what most Mac users (aka Apple fans) think, even though they don’t say it out loud (not all the time anyway). And so they go on fighting a war against Microsoft.

Microsoft lately seems to have stepped up its war not against the Apple fans but against Apple (I guess they see more profit in fighting Apple than its fans).

The latest anti-Apple add depicts a girl called “Lauren” with a specific assignment. To find a 17″ notebook for less than $1000. Seems like an easy mission, huh? But of course you will not find such a notebook in an Apple store.

Not because Apple does not have a 17″ notebook but because $1000 for such a notebook means a notebook on the low quality and low differentiation market. A market Apple has yet to enter… If they ever will. So what happens with Lauren?

She enters an Apple store. Comes out. And tells the audience that she cold not find what she was looking for. Have a look!

Now to the funny thing about this add. It really got the Apple fans going. Because, as you see in the movie Lauren seems to enter the Apple store and then, about 2 seconds later, exit the store. This they mean is a proof that Microsoft is lying.

It may just be that Lauren is a smart girl thinking “Easy money” (assuming she got payed for the add). “Apple does not carry such a notebook so I just enter the store and goes out at once. Tell them I could find what I was looking for just as they want and leave.”

Another twist to this war is that what many Apple fans seems to forget is that Microsoft saved Apple in 1997 by buying Series A non-voting convertible stock shares for $150 million. In 2001 and 2003 these were converted into a total of 18.2 million shares. Unless Microsoft got rid of these since then they are still one of the owners of Apple.

This actually may explain their behavior of their strange Apple ad attacks lately. Whatever they do they win. I mean if they make an add making people want to buy Macs they win. If they make people want to leave Apple and buy Windows based computer they win. I guess they only loose if users leave both companies and go for Linux or some other OS.

By the way, I wrote this on a mac using Safari 😉