Aaron Adams’s Blowhard Blog

A few months ago, David Pogue told my friend Shawn King in an interview that Apple’s switch campaign was a failure. Pogue is usually a pretty sharp pundit, but in this case he’s flat out wrong. If the Switch campaign was a failure because a tidal wave of Windows users didn’t knock over the local Apple store in their rush to purchase new computers, then yes, it was. From a more realistic perspective, the Switch campaign was a success. The point of the campaign was primarily to get people talking, to plant the idea into peoples’ minds, to get a conversation started, to make the idea acceptable Ñ and it has certainly succeeded. The fact that Pogue even uses the word “switcher” while putting the campaign down is evidence of that: Very rarely, before June of 2002, did anyone use the word “switcher” in reference to changing preferences from any computer platform to another. “Switcher” is now part of the Apple lexicon, and is starting to take hold in the general computing world as well.

And now, 36 months later, the iPod halo effect takes center stage.

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