Watching Microsoft and Apple trade blows with advertising spots is depressingly like watching Apple’s popular Get a Mac commercials. Microsoft looks lame. They even look lame to their most ardent supporters, like, for instance, me.

Apple deserves credit. They have sucessfully painted Windows Vista as a terrible operating system and its users as weird. Microsoft’s best response seems desperate by comparison: Well, some people like using Vista!

And their latest slogan is helping much. Life without walls? What does that even mean?

With 97% of the desktop market share it is questionable whether Microsoft even needs to win the cultural battlefield, and in the most important sense they don’t. Businesses don’t make purchasing decisions based on what is fashionable. They buy the product most likely to increase their productivity and help them make more money.

But, cultural perception does matter at the end of the day. Customers, whether personal users or business executives are people too. If Apple continues to convince the public their product is better, this will creep into Microsoft’s territory over time.

It is obvious Microsoft is placing some importance on the issue.  They were willing to burn $300 million on a short lived ad campaign featuring Jerry Seinfeld. They are continuing to remind people about the Mojave Experiment and highlighting the diversity of Windows users.

So, what should Microsoft be doing? Here are five things they can do (or do better).

Let’s begin.

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