What You Need to Know About Online Gift-Card Exchanges

The gift-giving season is over. Here’s how to turn in that gift card you don’t want — for cash — or buy other gift cards on the cheap.

Microsoft Tweaks Laptop Hunter Ads

Laptop Punters

Microsoft COO Kevin Turner must be so disappointed. Remarking on the company’s “PC Hunter” ad campaign last week, Turner said he’d been ebullient when attorneys for Apple called to complain. But now the company has quietly modified the ad in question to address Apple’s complaints.

Are Those Anti-Apple Microsoft Ads Actually Working?

The Web is full of armchair ad critics, particularly when it comes to spots from Apple and Microsoft. And the usual consensus from the chattering classes: Apple ads goooood. Microsoft ads baaaaaad. But Microsoft’s latest campaign, which features documentary-like tales of youngish people priced out by Apple, may actually be working. At least when it comes to youngish people’s perceptions of the two brands.

Pink PCs and Baseball Boys: These Microsoft Ads Are Growing on Me (But I Am Still a Mac!)

OK, the Lauren ad was a little too cute for its own good, and BoomTown has no interest in Giampaulo’s “really big hands.” But the latest installment of Microsoft’s real-people advertising campaign, called “Laptop Hunters”–this time a mother and son named Lisa and Jackson looking to score a computer–is pretty funny and sweet, and the main theme of hefty value over too-thin hipness is really starting to kick in. And while I cannot blame Microsoft for sticking to the Apple-Is-for-Value-Ignorant-Elites meme, I still wish that the messaging would move on from price to more important things such as how the software and hardware perform together.

Maybe Lauren's Not Cool Enough to Be a Google User, Either

With Microsoft’s February share of the search market weighing in at a paltry 8.2 percent and declining, the company is going to extraordinary lengths to reverse the public’s indifference to its search offering. It tried loyalty programs. It tried rewards programs. Now, as it prepares to rebrand its search engine under a new name–Kumo–it’s turning to a more proven method: an $80 million to $100 million advertising campaign.

Voices

More Money-Saving Tips From Lauren

Here is the latest comic from our Joy of Tech friends at Geek Culture, Nitrozac and Snaggy. Joy of Tech appears three times a week in the Voices section of this site. (Click on the image to see a bigger version.)