I don’t really like the new PC commercial that takes a shot back at the Mac ads with the tubby PC guy. I think it’s a milder form of political-style nastiness, and frankly, I think it lacks creativity. There’s so little creativity in advertising. There’s so much lazy copy. There’s so much imitation. Couldn’t they come up with something better than a united colors of Benetton slew of characters saying “I’m a PC.”

Unfortunately, I’m a PC. I have to be. When the majority of my customers’ users are on PCs, that’s what I have to design for. But it is and always will be the inferior platform. Windows is not the inferior operating system. Why? Because Windows is not an operating system. It is an application running on DOS. DOS is the actual operating system. DOS is the OS developed something like 30 years ago and more or less hijacked by Mr. Gates. Windows is the application that sits on top, and by virtue of being an application, it is far more of a resource hog than a true OS, such as the Mac sports.

I’m not saying Bill Gates is not clever. Despite his porn obsession (he should be in a 12 step program with David Duchovny) he was a very smart man. Smart, devious – whatever you want to call it. In the end, he is the winner by percentage.

The thing that really annoys me about the PC platform (other than this ridiculous concept that the machine with the greatest distribution is the better machine – after all, George Bush did apparently have the most votes, twice, but he is hardly a man at all) is the ridiculous amount of fluff. The computer I use at work just had an upgrade to Office 2003 (yes, that would be the still unstable application release from 5 years ago) the box has more or less ground to a halt. I am getting constant I/O errors, I have to restart multiple times a day to free my RAM cache, and I’m still not XP, not the memory-hog we know and love as Vista. Even the Help Desk techs at work say I need a memory upgrade.

And here’s what bugs me the most – Microsoft is touting this tagline: Windows; Life without walls. Um, I know that from a distance that may sound mildly poetic, but let’s analyze that a bit. See, if you don’t have walls, you don’t need freaking windows. This is what I mean by lazy copywriting. If you’re going to try and create a mood or a metaphor, at least work out the details. Right?