Since the iconic 1984 ad which played in the Superbowl half time interval, Apple has always drawn a clear culturally defined battle line between itself and first IBM (the realization of the big brother of 1984, or so Apple would have you believe) and more recently the ‘PC’ (of which Windows is the current embodiment).
The strength of their positioning lies in the ability to make ‘i-man/woman’ feel authentic and empowered as a result of their choice, whereas Microsoft /PC is wedded to a very different idea of individualism which essentially atomizes and universalizes the individual down to a consumer.
The everymen and every-women of the current Windows 7 advertising are a case in point. The role of the customer is not as a fan, co-creator or even critic, but a respondent from an interview or focus group. We are cogs in the Microsoft research and marketing machine, playing a strangely unconscious role in the process of the creation of our own consumer experience while reading from a script which seems to have been copied and pasted direct from the Windows 7 powerpoint presentation of the brand positioning statement. You can almost imagine the paperclip appearing saying ‘you appear to be writing copy for an unoriginal ad, would you like some help with that?’.
And that is where ‘I am a PC’ ultimately misses the point of the original Apple advertising which spawned this response from Microsoft. The point was that "I am a Mac" was a personification of the brand (as anti-establishment and original) not an existential statement about Mac users themselves. It establishes a cultural perspective which is satirizing the world of PC as the grey, industrialized, uniform experience of the modern (formal) working environment. (I am no fan of the Apple myself, preferring my black, indestructible IBM as the true choice of the ‘authentic’ user of hardware - : ) and still mourning their transformation to Lenovo!)
The more Windows references this fictional creation of the i-man through implicit the cultural context in which their advertising communicates the more it reinforces the Apple positioning. This is rather like British Airways seeing Virgin as the enemy in the 1990’s when in reality they had less than 10% of the planes and routes of BA and were quite happy to get the free publicity of BA attacking advertising which just reinforced their alternative, antiestablishment image. Windows is trapped as the brand leader held in thrall of the everyman for fear of losing its quantitative majority in the market, but in the process losing any qualitative leadership it might have laid claim to – after all arguably Apple would not or even could not exist, nor have a reason to innovate, if Windows (and Microsoft) didn’t exist as the bad guy to provide their motivation. Perhaps Microsoft are happy with this situation, but as the i-pad demonstrates they could very quickly become a polar bear on the shrinking ice cap of the 'PC’, as they get left behind by a proliferation of devices about which they have no ‘point of view’. And then Apple will need a new monster for its i-man to slay.
Quick update - just to put all this in perspective, read this from the Daily Mash (hat tip to Will D).Update 2 - maybe the answer can be foundat the LSE?