Microsoft and General Motors.

I had a bit of an epiphany this morning, a moment of planner-like insight that rarely strikes anyone, much less planners.

Here's what happened. I have a regular Thursday psycho-therapy (two-word) appointment at 8AM. This week my Thursday appointment was moved to Wednesday. I duly noted that change on my Microsoft Office calendar and when I got the notification this morning that my appointment was looming I ignored it. Instead I blamed the early notification on some Microsoft gremlin. In short, MSFT software is so frequently buggy and incomprehensible that I assumed it was in error.

Here's my point: regardless of all the hundreds of millions of dollars Microsoft spends at JWT, Crispin of McCann trying to let people know that they're human and cool, everyday for the last fifteen years or so people have been daily reminded that instead of cool, Microsoft is buggy, broken and dumb.

It occurs to me that Microsoft's marketing approach is much like that of American car companies. Rather than saying at some point, "we fucked up building rattle-traps and lemons with obsolescence built in. We fucked up blaming everything on unions and healthcare costs. We fucked up maintaining a dealer network that if they're not downright dishonest, at the very least they don't treat consumers with respect." Instead the American automakers stayed a monolith. Hid behind a cloak of "Buy American-ism" and "what's good for GM is good for the country."

Updated to 2009, this is essentially Microsoft's posture as well. Rather than fixing its product, they issue patches (Detroit called those recalls) and try to put one over on consumers by saying they're shiny, new and cool (Detroit said longer, lower, wider.) Never was there any candor. An admission that when you get a "blue screen of death" it's not your fault.

Microsoft today seems as impervious as the auto industry seemed 50 years ago. Then Volkswagen entered the picture--the Apple of its day. Then the Japanese. Then the Koreans. All at once, no more American auto industry.

But don't worry about Microsoft.

JWT, Crispin and McCann say they're cool.