Internet whipping boy of the month: Microsoft Songsmith

There was once a time when the worst thing that could happen to a bad product or advertising campaign was that it wouldn’t appeal to anyone and fade into obscurity. Unfortunately for businesses and PR people, since the Internet came to town, those days are well and truly over.

These days, the Internet has developed into a cruel and ruthless beast. Like a world-wide school yard, Internet users will latch on to a joke, failure or weakness, and tease, ridicule and beat it well and truly into submission.

Don’t get me wrong, I generally love the merciless and snarky treatment meted out instantly to wholly deserving subjects, but do occasionally feel for the marketing and business people who get about 5 minutes to tap into this week’s online zeitgeist before they’re met with thousands of “FAIL”s and YouTube spoof videos.

The most recent butt of the Net’s jokes has been a new bit of Microsoft software called Songsmith. The idea is that you sing to the program, and it automatically generates melodically and rhythmically appropriate backing music.

Poor Microsoft. Once synonymous with “cool” and cutting edge technology, in recent years it has found itself more associated with clunky software and stale, conservative design. This is probably in no small part due to Apple’s excellent Mac vs PC ad campaign, but also due to their feet-dragging on the Internet in general, where they let Google take the lead with a cooler, healthier image. Microsoft’s recent attempts to revamp their image with Jerry Seinfeld flopped miserably (using a celebrity who most people associate solidly with the ’90s? How does such a rich company full of geniuses get it so wrong?!), with the Internet passing judgment within minutes: Epic. Fail.

The Internet is like that uber-popular clique of girls in high school on out-of-uniform day; they don’t need hours to assess the merits of your outfit — they know within seconds if you’ve “got it”. And they’ll let you know — loudly — if you don’t.

So Microsoft is already the dorky try-hard in the wrong brand of jeans. And then they release this:

“Microsoft, huh? So it’s… pretty easy to use?”

Oy.

If this is supposed to be Microsoft’s answer to Garage Band, someone needs to be fired. It’s like when you asked for an electric guitar for Christmas and got a cheap Casio keyboard.

The Internet’s response? What do you reckon?

Says popular blog VideoGum:

In 2009, even the lamest cultural contributions have some kind of underlying self-awareness. Like, even the people who work for Bill O’Reilly, or the SkyMall catalog, are aware that what they work on sucks. But a job’s a job and they probably find a way to have fun with it (especially at the SkyMall catalog.) So that’s why this REAL commercial for Microsoft’s new Songsmith software (you sing at it and it creates horrible musak to accompany you) is completely insane. Not only is it apparently earnest and not a parody, self- or otherwise, it seems like it comes from a bizarro parallel universe where irony was never discovered. It’s like Microsoft found some kind of home-schooling Christian commune in the woods and hired them to make their commercial.

It might have ended with that. “Nice try, Microsoft, you’re still lame. Go away now.” BUT. People actually started downloading the program, and a new meme was born.

It actually started with another meme, which was the isolated vocal track from Van Halen’s Runnin’ With The Devil that people had been playing around with. Then someone had the idea of putting the vocal track into Songsmith, and a monster was created.

Songsmith mash-ups are now the thing to be doing this month. And with good reason: the terribly cheesy backing tracks turn everything into comedy gold. Here are some of my favourites:

Intergalactic – Beastie Boys

Wonderwall – Oasis

Roxanne – The Police

It’s a double-edged sword for Microsoft — on the one hand, the product is getting loads of attention; on the other, it’s not really for the right reasons.

Songsmith will undoubtedly be unceremoniously dumped by the Internet faster than you can say “David Hasselhoff” as soon as the next unintentionally lame thing comes along.

But on the bright side, they may get a stand at the next ROFLCon.