OpenOffice in Microsoft’s Turf…
I just came across this story on Digg -
OpenOffice’s anti-MSFT bus ads in Redmond
“Sun Microsystems has posted extremely pointed OpenOffice.org ads on the sides of transit buses that serve Redmond. Slogans include, ‘Stop giving a bully your lunch money,’ ‘Compatible with expensive, closed, memory-loving software,’ and ‘Prehistoric reptilians welcome.’ Booya!”
Well, I really thought this was great. Wade Rockett posted on ‘The New Marketing‘ that this morning, he began to see a variety of ads for OpenOffice.org’s Office suite posted by Sun Microsystems on busses across the city of Bellavue, which is very close to Redmond.
The ads, which appear to be targetted at local business people, and possibly even microsoft employees, focus on the many of the benefits of OpenOffice.org over the defacto standard, Microsoft Office.
Of course, this move hasn’t gone unnoticed by Microsoft. On ‘The .NET Sweatshop’, Microsoft Developer SandyK fires back with some cutting remarks about Sun.
The ads have been posted below. These are from the flickr gallery by Wade Rockett. If you want any of the T-Shirts shown in the ads, you can get them from Sun Microsystems’ Sun Open Source Store.
Thanks for the link and the photo credit! Sorry that I’m not much of a photographer - I guess if you lean close and squint, you can make out the slogans.
I’d love to know which ad agency did them.
No problem, considering I essentially ripped the article from you…
It’s is a bit annoying to me that SandyK in her blog, rather than fight back against OpenOffice by focusing on the product benefits (hah) of Microsoft Office… Instead she felt the need to just rip at Sun over some completely unrelated issues!
Hahahahahaha,
very well deserved …
US-opoly
woooooow what a true point!
I dunno. There are sort of funny but mostly, to me, pathetic. I would thing that Sun would have better things to do with their money that something like this which might make them feel better about their business but will likely have very little impact on it. Do they actually think the people who decide to purchase Office-type software are influenced by ads like this?
Microsoft deserves far worse. However it doesn’t change how childish this is.
[…] On another note, this reminds me of the time when OpenOffice.org plastered Redmond transit routes frequented by Microsoft employees with ads promoting the OpenOffice.org software. […]