Although Microsoft’s clever jabs at Apple over the past year have managed to win a few fans, a new parody video, posted by the company on Friday, apparently wasn’t having the desired effect and has now been pulled from YouTube.Titled “A fly on the wall in Cupertino?” the video depicts a series of fictional meetings held at Apple’s Cupertino, Calif., headquarters sometime in early 2013. During the meetings, two executives come up with various pitches for the new iPhone, directed at two executives whose faces remains obscured but seem to resemble Apple design chief Jony Ive and the late Steve Jobs.
However, at one point in the video, the person who resembles Jobs from the back is addressed by the nickname “T,” indicating that it might have been an attempt to depict current Apple CEO Tim Cook.
While the video starts off with a small dig at the rumored Apple “iWatch,” from then on the pitches all focus on the new iPhones as the executives come up with a number of seemingly flimsy reasons for the device’s new features. Most of the jokes are directed at the iPhone 5C for its color choices and polycarbonate shell. The fake execs pitch over-the-top sounding colors such as vermilion, chartreuse, and “robin’s egg blue.”
Later in the video, in what is probably the most direct slap against the iPhone 5C, the pitch person says, “Did we have to make the new iPhones out of plastic to save money? Yeah bro.” At one point, the lead pitch person even touches on the iPhone’s price, gleefully adding, “And the beauty part is we can charge whatever we want.”
No Microsoft branding or mention of the Windows Phone platform appears in the video, but the spot does end with a message that reads “#timetoswitch.” Reactions to the video were mixed, but many commenters appear to think that, aside from not being very funny, the video’s visual reference to Jobs in the video may have been in poor taste.
The video no longer appears on Microsoft’s Windows Phone YouTube channel, but a couple of YouTube users managed to capture the two-minute spot which, as of this writing, could still be viewed online. – Google Science
