Microsoft Debutes Branded T-Shirts
That pre-eminent name in software, Microsoft, is flipping the vowels around to get into the “softwear” business — as in T-shirts with a retro ’80s feel.
The shirts, which hit retail stores last month, are meant to tie into the “I’m a PC” campaign developed by agency Crispin Porter & Bogusky for Microsoft and aimed at humanizing the tech behemoth.
Sold under the name “Softwear by Microsoft,” the shirts offer a number of patterns that hark back to the early, pre-Web days of computers, when commands had caret marks around them and PCs were oatmeal-colored. One of the shirts celebrates 1985, the year the Windows operating system was first generally available.
“With retro logos, classic photos and geek-chic iconography, these pieces showcase the DOS days of the software company that now connects over a billion people,” says the Microsoft Web page devoted to the clothing.
Those “classic photos” will include the now-famous mug shot of Microsoft founder Bill Gates after he was booked in 1977 on a speeding violation by the police in Albuquerque, NM, the site of the company’s first headquarters. Details of the apparent arrest “have been lost over time,” according to the Smoking Gun Web site but Gates himself showed the mug shot in a speech back in 1999.
Other designs in the Softwear line have been suggested by rapper Common, including a green-on-gray transcription of his song “I Used to Love H.E.R.” that resembles an old user interface. In a video on the Softwear Web site, Chicago-based Common talks about how his designs for the Microsoft T-shirt line “reflect both our brands and our movements in a unified way.” Common says ’85 was special for him as the year he first began writing rap songs.
Microsoft has adopted a strategy of fostering and celebrating brand loyalty among its Vista users in response to the very successful series of Mac vs. PC commercials aired by rival system Apple. The “I’m a PC” campaign asks user fans to upload videos about what they do with their PCs at the Web site, and possibly find themselves in a future Microsoft TV spot.
While on that site, fans can also click through to shopping site Zazzle and buy branded “I’m a PC” products, including mouse pads, coffee mugs, note paper and apparel such as ties and Keds sneakers.
The idea to put the Gates booking photo on a T-shirt may have originated back in September, when Ultimate Fighting title contender Rashad Evans was photographed entering the Octagon wearing Gates’s mug shot on a T-shirt. Evans was part of the first “I’m a PC” TV spot that aired later that month. He was also featured in a longer “I’m a PC” video that went up on the YouTube Windows channel in November. That video had garnered more than half a million views at press time.
Whether or not the Softwear line catches on as a fashion statement, it came in for immediate Web criticism as a promotional tactic for Microsoft. Many of those comments reflected confusion that Microsoft and its agency were trying to connect with the young-adult T-shirt wearing crowd by harking back to the early days of computers.
“The people Microsoft should be marketing to don’t have any nostalgia for DOS,” posted Joe Wilcox in the Microsoft Watch blog. “They are either too young to remember MS-DOS or just old enough to want to forget using it.”
In commenting on the new T-shirts, one blogger referred to Microsoft’s reputation for releasing software before removing the bugs: “So will they mail you patches to sew on every couple of months?”
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