At the end of 1983, I was hired by keye/donna/pearlstein to run a new account:
Microsoft.
 At
the time, Microsoft was dependent on the revenues from MS-DOS and the version licensed
to IBM, PC-DOS, for the bulk of its income. A lot of the rest came from programming
languages, and application software contributed some money, too.
They
had just 'sampled' Word to PC users by binding a demo into PC World magazine, and
they needed help to launch their upcoming products, including something called 'Windows',
which they expected to bring out in late '83 or early '84.
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We established a look for Microsoft products that carried across all the
product lines.
This ad introduced the concept of WYSIWYG word processing:
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In
1984, the Macintosh was to be introduced, and many within Microsoft believed that
nobody would want a PC once they saw the Mac. So fully half Microsoft's application
programming resources were dedicated to Mac applications.
Although
nothing was ready to ship, Microsoft ran this ad in the premiere issue of Macworld
distributed at the Annual Meeting in 1984 that launched the Macintosh:
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Microsoft's
big product for 1985 was Excel, the Lotus-beater. Appearing first on the Macintosh,
it was hoped Excel would give that platform a 'big business' application to pull
it into the Fortune 1,000. Apple hoped so, too, and pledged to match advertising
spending for Excel.
Under
the cretive leadership of Robert Chandler, we developed a fun campaign: '50 ways
to leave your Lotus'. Clearly, that would have been a powerful and memorable message.
But Bill Gates, who needed Lotus to continue developing for Windows, sent the ideas
over to Mitch Kapor, then -president of Lotus, and when he stopped laughing, Lotus
said 'no way'. And we had to kill the campaign.
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The
ads we did run were great-looking (if phallic), but not the home run we could have
had.
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