The Numbers Game

Fan-made response to Microsoft’s campaign of Surface/iPad comparison commercials. It’s a silly thing for me to flag, but I think this guy has it all wrong. His response is all about the iPad’s quantitative advantages — that it outsells the Surface, has more apps in its app store, has more peripherals (cases/covers/keyboards) available, and so forth.

As I’ve argued before, this is the wrong mindset. The point is to buy the best stuff. I use the iPad because I think it’s the best tablet, not because it’s the best-selling tablet. I prefer the iOS App Store not because it has the most apps, but because it has the best apps. Breadth matters — an app store with only a handful of titles, all of them high quality, would be a failure — but depth matters more. Otherwise we’d all be using Windows.

Update: As Michael Mulvey points out, the actual spots from Microsoft’s campaign don’t even need to be parodied.

Thursday, 8 August 2013