Mac or PC? PC Google Ads Suggest a Mac
There’s an interesting little poll running to gauge whether people given $3,000 would buy a Mac or a PC. Not surprisingly it is running way in favor of Macs. 74% at the moment. That’s no surprise, firstly because it was posted on Digg in the Apple category—so guess who is seeing it the most? Mac faithful. Secondly, Mac users, being the outspoken types they are, are much more inclined to vote on polls like this. What is most interesting though, and delightfully ironic, is that the site’s Google ads promote how to fix and maintain your PC. Here’s some examples: - Windows XP Errors? Free registry scan, fix errors and improve PC performance. - Repair DLL Errors. Fix windows DLL & other PC errors instantly. - Fix Blue Screen of Death. 2006 Highly-rated remover. Fix your computer. - Fix Blue Screen of Death. PC too sloow, crashing, freezing? Free scan and repair. 100% guaranteed. - Get MemTurbo 4 Now. Help increase the memory available to your Windows PC applications. - Your Computer Too Slow? Fixes slow PC. Prevents slowing and crashes. - Stop waiting, fix your PC. It’s easy as 1-2-3. Free scan and you’re away. Windows Shutdown Problem? Put an end to Windows shutdown problems. - PC Errors Repairer. Fix errors and registry problems. Inhance [sic] your Computers [sic] Priformence [sic] That last one tells me one thing their computer could do with is a spell checker. I also like that one with the 100% guarantee. How can I believe that when PC problems are so prevalent according to these ads? But there were a couple for Mac users and my absolute favorite of all the ads was this one: Run Windows on your Mac. Parallels Desktop now shipping. Yeah sure! Why would you after seeing all those other ads telling you how much grief to expect? Maybe maintenance is an issue with PCs It’s a funny thing how easy it is to find people who swear they never have any troubles with Windows problems. They tell you their PCs run fine with little attention. That may be so, but given the proliferation of ads on Google for maintaining your PC, you’d have to to think those people are as much in the minority of computers users as we Mac users are. It’s obvious a lot of those ads above are nothing more than spam, but if you look at the things spam targets most, it is the things people are most concerned about: Sex, Porn and having a PC that is working well enough to download porn. Those ads for PC repairs wouldn’t be there if many people weren’t desperately looking for help. Every time I get on a Windows PC I encounter one problem and then find others while trying to fix the first. I was asked to setup and install broadband for a friend who’d tried and failed and had a tech try who’d also failed. Upon booting her PC, it said it was missing files. Several reboots later (maybe it needed warming up), it finally started happily. The missing files magically reappeared. As I said, this wasn’t the problem she’d called me over to look at. I ran some tests but found no cause so told her to keep an eye on it and call me if it reoccurred. (Should I have said “when”?) I then installed her broadband without any problems. (I still got the mojo!) It’s hard to justify Macs to people based solely on my own experience of them. I guess people figure I’m a computer nerd so switching would have been easy for me, but they’d struggle. However, I have found a much more effective way of explaining the difference. I tell them my brother’s story. My brother and I don’t talk much anymore about computers. He bought a Mac. When he had a PC, he rang me every four to six weeks with some question or problem. In the 18 months since he bought a Mac, he’s called me twice. Once early on with a couple of questions, and once a couple of months ago when he had a problem with Word crashing. I fixed it by sending him a CD with the latest OS X Software Updates on it. (He’s not on broadband if you’re wondering why he hadn’t applied Software Updates.) I told a PC user this story recently - i.e. the two calls in 18 months - and she was flabbergasted. Obviously maintenance is an issue for her too. It always fascinates me when I overhear conversations between average people about virus checkers, slow and crashing computers, According to my friends, my family, people in the street and even Google ads, maintenance is a big issue for most PC users. I just don’t hear people having maintenance issues with Macs. I guess that makes it easy to know what computer I’d spend my $3,000 on, but with all those PC problems, it wouldn’t matter how much I had to spend, I’d still get a Mac.
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Comments
I guess the distribution and content of SPAM raises disturbing questions about the length of penises or hot stock prices.
Absolutely! Good analogy, Beeb. Spam addresses what is important to people. Sexual performance and making money are very important to people.
But as you point out:
Maybe it proves that people just aren’t interested in Macs.
(Which we already knew given Apple’s tiny market share)
So these Google ads, spam or not, show another thing that is important to people is minimizing the frustrations of using Windows PCs.
Thanks Beeb, your arguments reinforce that spam targets people’s major worriess, and as these ads are spamming Windows maintenance, Windows maintenance must be a real and serious problem for people.
You’re a champion for the cause. Apple should put you on their payroll.
Thanks! Get a Mac, eh?!
Thanks Beeb, your arguments reinforce that spam targets people’s major worriess, and as these ads are spamming Windows maintenance, Windows maintenance must be a real and serious problem for people.
Actually, no. Your argument is that the ads prove that “Windows maintenence is a real and serious problem.”
That would be like saying that penis enlargement spam proves that most men actually have small penises.
What the ads MIGHT show is that SOME men have a FEAR/ANXIETY about it (about 3% if we measure the response-rate of these ads) which is not the same thing.
The FEAR is not proof of a problem, particularly when that fear is manifested and promoted by people with a vested financial interest in solving the supposed problem. Just ask any Mac user when they see a report about the latest Mac virus from Symantec.
The comparison to spam is not a good one. The purpose of sending spam is to *very* cheaply advertise to a massive range of people, hoping that a very few of them will be fool-hardy and/or insecure enough to pay for your quackery.
The paid Google advertising we see here is used largely by software companies with a legitimate product. If they are using this advertising service, they realise that they require targeted adverts that are cost-effectively delivered to a set of users that corresponds to their demographic.
The important difference is that these companies are paying for their advertising. They cannot afford to advertise to the whole of society, hoping to play off a tiny set of people’s insecurities, and instead pay for advertising that is supposed to target an appropriate user base.
That point restated: Google’s advertising is supposed to access an appropriate demographic by analysing the contents of a page, and thereby in theory inferring the types of users who will be seeing whatever ads are placed on that particular page.
That is to say, whatever your feelings may be about the state of security in Windows, if on pages with a “windows theme” there is a high incidence of adverts concerning windows maintenance, then clearly Google feels that the windows-interested section of web users are an appropriate demographic for windows maintenance software.
It would also show that people are paying for the maintenance software, since otherwise the companies providing it would go bust from unblanaced expenditure on advertising on no income!
It is not a far stretch then, to realise that if one of the most prevalent types of advertising for 3rd party windows apps is related to fixing windows, then those apps are a lucrative sector of 3rd party windows software. And either there is a real problem with windows, or as you say, people are afraid and companies are caching in on their fear.
Personally I believe there are problems with viruses etc on Windows, and further my experience is that endemic problems with Windows XP lead to degradation in performance; so the market in fixes for such problems is not illegitimate, in my view.
if on pages with a “windows theme” there is a high incidence of adverts concerning windows maintenance…
It would also show that people are paying for the maintenance software…
It is not a far stretch then…
That’s three stretches to get to the point; which is looking more and more like a pretzel because of it.
First of all, these ads ARE cheap. And they don’t have to make much money to pay for themselves. It’s probably safe to argue that they could exploit ONLY the most gullible Windows users and still make a handsome profit.
I’m not suggesting that PCs don’t have maintenence issues. And given the relative number of low-cost PC manufacturers (some) compared to Macs (none), it’s probably safe to say that some users have a higher number of maintenence issues.
But the idea that this INCREDIBLY NARROW sampling of seven Google ads from one web page (plus Chris’s anecdotes) proves anything is utter nonsense.
Actually, no. Your argument is that the ads prove that “Windows maintenence is a real and serious problem.”
No, no, Beeb, that was your argument. I just made a supposition that that was the case. The first person to talk about proving anything was yourself. It was you who set out to prove my supposition - and you quite successfully did.
Which again, we all appreciate.
You don’t have to be modest. Take the credit.
Beeblebrox - you don’t think that your comment
I’m not suggesting that PCs don’t have maintenence issues
suggest that the point
It’s probably safe to argue that they could exploit ONLY the most gullible Windows users and still make a handsome profit
is, frankly, beside the?
That’s three stretches to get to the point;
Actually the second and third points are separate corollaries of the first. (In other words the third does not need the second to stand.)
Even if it were accurate, this is also a very poor critique—logically, the idea that one can disprove something by counting the steps in the argument and ignoring the content of that argument is… well, you know what it is.