Microsoft attacks Apple's new iPhones: is this the single worst commercial in ... - Telegraph.co.uk (blog)

Above the tedious banter of the pub bore, there is the horror of corporate banter. You can trace it back to the cutesy posturing of Innocent in the 90s, persuading us that juiced fruit is countercultural – but it has spread across industries to some of the biggest corporations in the world.

Microsoft, still led by Steve Ballmer (a strategically shaved ape with a salesman's brain and an orangutan's dance moves) is among the most leaden-footed. Its latest terrible video (and this is a firm that once made a "funny" clip with Bill Gates and Ballmer driving along in a battered old car to Da Da Da by Trio) is an attempt to mock Apple.

Now let's be honest here, there's plenty to mock Apple about from high prices to Jony Ive's inability to wear anything beyond that one, voluminous grey T-shirt. But when it comes to mocking Apple's products, you need to be a lot sharper than the marketing muppets in Microsoft, a department that thought "Surface with Windows RT" sounded like snappy branding. Two videos – since withdrawn by Microsoft – feature two "Apple" employees running through the specifications of the iPhone 5C and iPhone 5S. The aim of the clips is to imply that the phones bring nothing to the party beyond new colours and the 5S's fingerprint scanner. It's reductive but then so were Apple's Mac vs PC commercials. It's the execution that's the problem. Those responsible for this abysmal series of ads should be fired…from a cannon…into the sun. Microsoft couldn't do funny if it appointed Jackie Mason as Vice-President for Gags & Commercial Quippery.

Apple mocked PCs while making the John Hodgman/David Mitchell character likeable. It said: PCs are loveable and interesting but they just won't get the job done efficiently or be as much fun. Microsoft clearly wants to ride the prevalent opinion that Apple is all style and no substance but it can't land its punches. It was similarly feckless with its attack on Google, the witless "Scroogled" campaign. If Microsoft really wants to make consumers laugh, it should relaunch the Zune.