We have seen Microsoft run TV commercials for Windows 8, its Surface tablets, Windows Phone and even for services like Outlook in the past couple of years. Now the company is in the middle of a new television ad campaign that moves away from consumer products. The commercial is supposed to show how its business-themed cloud services work together to help companies, or even a racing team, become more efficient.
The new ad, which has been running for the past few days on many U.S. TV networks and has been posted on YouTube, attempts to show how the Lotus Formula 1 racing team uses a number of Microsoft cloud services such as Azure, Office 365 and Dynamics to collect and analyze data from 200 sensors on the car. The ad"s main them is that the cloud products offer the Lotus team a way to better understand how the F1 vehicle runs on each track and, therefore, give them an edge in winning races.
The new TV commercial comes even as rumors hit the Internet that Microsoft is planning to rebrand its Windows Azure cloud website hosting service to Microsoft Azure, in order to better reflect the fact that it can use software not made by the company like Linux.
Source: Microsoft on YouTube