Office Team Lead: Guys, we need something really exciting to make people excited about Office 2010.
Some Office Programmer Guy: Can we call Google to hint at ChromeOS to take the heat off of us when we launch on Monday?
OTL: Already done. We need a video.
SOPG: What should it include? A little run-through of the program? Sort of a screencast that folks can watch and understand and then maybe get excited about Office 2010? Maybe we can put some Feist in there? Make it really minimalistic?
OTL: No. We need an action movie.
SOPG: What?
OTL: We have a huge marketing budget and nothing to spend it on. Let’s hire some dude to make a movie.
SOPG: But that won’t tell anyone anything about the product?
OTL: Who cares. We don’t need to sell Office anymore. People will just buy it without thinking. People are dumb.
SOPG: But what about Google Apps?
OTL: A red herring. They’re unusable. This is much better.
SOPG: Can I move onto the XBox team?
OTL: Soon. Soon.
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by
John Biggs
on
July 9, 2009
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Office 2010: The Movie. Too Funny. – The Next Web
July 9th, 2009 at 13:28 -
Office 2010 promo video « PATSWITCH.WORDPRESS
July 9th, 2009 at 14:05 -
Office 2010: the movie « WEBsessed Blog
July 10th, 2009 at 06:46 -
Office 2010: The Movie. Too Funny. « The best social media guide on the Internet
July 11th, 2009 at 22:11
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Amazing!!! I can’t wait. Certainly shows promise. Love the commercial.
Oh my GAWD, I lol’ed over 9000 times.
What 9,000! There’s no way that could be right!
No, really, 9,000, look I calculated it in Excel…
Sorry, wasn’t funny. Just shows you are a bitter fanboy. TC should be more factual, less pussy.
You are kidding right?
I hope everyone who said they liked the ad was kidding.
What is the marketing department at Microsoft thinking? Microsoft Office 2010 is not going to be an epic release, so it’s not comparable to the 1984 Apple ad. This ad is just hokey, and way too long. I might have said it was a good promotion if it was a 30-second spot. I want to know if Office 2010 is going to convince me to stop using Google Apps, which wouldn’t be hard to do consider all of the aspects of Google Apps that suck.
nice movie…. dunno why they mention the term “font” so many times?
I thought that was awesome – funny, tongue-firmly-planted-in-cheek. good stuff.
While I enjoyed the video, even laughed a few times, I learned absolutely nothing about office 2010.
Who cares.. your going to look when they release it after seeing that.. it is called generating a prerelease interest..
Love it… and hilarious when they say “From the VISIONARY creators of 2007 & 2003″ especially….
Let us see what new they bring to the product expect the usual UI change…..(from 2003 to 2007)…
Fantastic!
I laughed at the Clippy grave part…..that was kind of funny….and kind of stupid.
RIP Clippy
What is wrong with MSFT marketing dept? A huge budget for that video and the most exciting thing they could find to talk was fonts and copy/paste? Wow.
I wasted 2 minutes of my life for that? Microsoft, maybe you should focus on actual products and not just their hype…
Open Office FTW!
“I loved it. It was better than Cats. I want to see it again and again”
That was funny. Poor Clippy “R.I.P.”
Meow, meow, John. Treating Microsoft and MS Office like the Death Star is so 1998. Lighten up and enjoy the funny promo clip.
did I say anything?
Didn’t have to. Your commentary with the video oozes contempt.
It’s deserving of nothing but contempt isn’t it. Another failed attempt at trying to be funny … or something. As someone who hasn’t used Office for several years this certainly didn’t make me want to investigate further.
That was slick and so well done.
Well done to MS for that vid.
You guys that think this is a result of a “huge” marketing spend, have never done marketing for any company of a reasonable size. It’s not that expensive and these days, it’s sort of a requirement to have something buzz worthy to standout amongst all of the other noise/hype.
Well done IMHO.
That was awesome… RIP Clippy!
Seriously though… those F-16 fighter jets better have been CG
Hilarious! I love it. Microsoft did a great series of commercials for Office 2007 too called “Brand New Day”. (Unfortunately, I can’t find a link to them anywhere.)
Cool but highly idiotic.
Oh I get it, you’re all on crack, this is stupid, unentertaining, and as retarded as Office 2010 will be.
This isn’t real, is it? This is The Onion or College Humor or something. Microsoft didn’t really make this, did they? Wow, they’ve finally gone over the nutty edge. This makes me nostalgic for the Seinfeld/Gates ads.
Okay, look, I get it. They want to add some excitement and some fun. Okay, I get it, I really do…but….
For the amount of money Microsoft has to spend on this stuff, why can’t they hire more talent, esp on the writing side?
They mixed the death of Clippy with Hypnotic Fonts?? What was the point of that? (It seems to me they are mixing story lines.)
Are they trying to take a shot at Apple and/or Google with the whole “…transient hypnosis beliving anything they read…”? Who know? It’s not really clear.
Why not pick ONE story line – the death of clippy or the hypnotic fonts and go with that? (Why are they chasing down a hacker?? Isn’t their software supposed to be secure?)
MSFT could have made a much better “trailer” than this.
This falls flat, just like those stupid ads they had to cancel a few months ago.
I know, all you Tech Crunch geeks found the death of clippy funny, but the rest of us see through this as poorly done hype that misses the mark.
MSFT missed a golden opportunity to create a truly great viral video to announce a new product.
A few guys in the IT dept will wet themselves, but that’s about it.
kinda felt sad.
they took a look at iphone ad and made a longer version.
The best ist the end! Looks like a system (or software) error while displaying fonts… was this part meant as preview for stability? ;-))
While I enjoyed it and think it’s very viral (I already posted it on Twitter and Facebook), I can’t help but wonder how much that cost to produce…
MS using google (via youtube) to get their marketing campaign out…oh the irony.
Do you really think Google doesn’t use any MSFT products? It’s not really ironic at all…it’s just the way things are.
Was that for real?!?! o.0 I refuse to believe that M$ actually made that. Wow. Just wow.
note to self, never watch Microsoft-produced video ever again.
Not quite as good as the Microsoft iPod video (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aeXAcwriid0) but still very well made and entertaining. Kudos to Microsoft for going out of their way creating unusual content for us to enjoy.
The promo is pretty funny and entertaining…doesn’t really say or allude to anything about the product suite. I kind of feel like there isn’t a lot of room to grow with this product line. The interface switch in 2007 definitely impeded my workflow and I still find myself accessing ‘Help’ to just locate where a function has be relocated. So they could certainly improve the user interface. My other big concern is Microsoft’s continued use of Word as the HTML rendering engine in Outlook. Its a piece of crap and Outlook 2010 (as is 2007) will be a lesser quality product than its 2003 version. I’ve already decided not to upgrade to Office 2010 for that reason alone.
http://fixoutlook.org/
that was utter crap and a total embarrassment for MSFT. redmond needs a f’ing clue.
I say to M$, skip Office 2010 and go forward with The Movie.
Funny how Microsoft releases an epic advertisement that says nothing about their product and gets:
“Wah wah screw you MS that was awful!”
While Apple did the exact same thing 25 years ago to launch the Macintosh, and it was considered one of the best ads of the year. Marketing doesn’t work the way you think it does.
The Apple ad was a representation of what they were launching. This one is just bored guys with a camera and a budget.
Had MS just released your usual promo, the same article writer would have bitched about how boring things are and how MS can’t do anything new and outside the box.
Kudos, that video was great. It made me aware that office 2010 is coming, so it was successful.
This isn’t new – Purdue has been using parody trailers to promote IT projects for years. See: http://www.itap.purdue.edu/cores
Love the conversation John made up, good work.
Just don’t take it so seriously, guys. Microsoft is slacking off, so let it be. Quite a nice vid they’ve made anyway.
I was LOLing at that Clippy reference, like it was a partner of that male agent. Also, seems like they’re giving the Office apps names to the agents and characters. Seems like “Word” is the bad guy(yeah, seeing that it’s the app creating all documents), and Powerpoint and all other guys are agents or something. Another interesting thought, remember those lines like “Excel and Sharepoint Workspace blahblahblah”, “Onenote is here”, or “Visio is back”? They kinda made a pun on that. It may be agents’ names, but it might also be what’s in the Office bundle.
Oh, and did anyone get the funny part I found? Remember in the interrogation room part, when the agent is asking about the font, and the bad guy answered “Somewhere between Arial and Wingdings”? Arial is about the first default font and Wingdings is at the end of the default font lists, so that female isn’t helping at all. That’s why the male agent went crazy, got that?
Last thought, actually Office 2010 isn’t that bad. I mean, excluding the UI changes, there are actually something else, I can’t really list them though. I still wish MS would create a better ad besides the Office2010themovie thingy.
i actually thought that was a vid off of The Onion. I don’t know what to say
Looks good huh.. I wonder If Bill gates would show up in the movie.
(About the trailer: I am wondering why they mention the “fonts”, I like the woman who said, “the font is in between Arial to Windings”, cool huh?)
Quite funny. But I wonder if this is what Microsoft spends their millions on! Maybe that’s where all our licence fees go to. Hmm.
Wow… it’s a film that I’m actually wanting to Access!
I hope those “Secret” agents Excel at There jobs!
And I hope they take (one)Note of OpenOffice.
And I think I need to stop with these awful puns, lest my outlook starts looking grim…
(oh one more!)
Any how I could really get into the Groove of this new Office suite
Word.
(and honestly, who else wanted that paper clip 6 feet under?)
They’re spending this kind of cake on action-movie commercials, but they’re still rendering HTML emails in Outlook using their Word engine?
Priorities fail.
LOL at all the butthurt microsoft haters
I thought the clip was funny and well done, especially the dead clippy and wingdings in the interrogation room.
Lame.
OpenOffice.org FTW!
some ppl have nothing to do at all!
Hahaha LOL this actually did not suck at all. Does this mean Microsoft wants to be HIP and not Nerds.
oh I forgot what was that about clippy don’t let them bring ZOMBIES BACK NOOOOOOOOO.
That was AWESOME!
Microsoft certainly been doing the right moves last couple of months. Maybe they are getting back in to the game now… I can smell fear.
OpenOffice? You must be kidding! Worst piece of software ever written. Like they say, there is a reason it is free.. Three licenses of Office 2007 for $90? I´d pay $100 for one license if it would save me from OpenOffice!
I am not dead that was paul…
I can’t see the vid – I just see a blank spot where the vid is supposed to be….