You know that old saying... all is fair in operating system measuring contests? Well, enter the unorthodox daddy of all operating system measuring contests... Apple. With Mac OS X in the position of the underdog, along with Linux, in relation to Windows, the Cupertino-based hardware company has a lot to prove. And it's doing it with a novel marketing approach, aiming a consistent degree of irony at its direct rivals. Rivals because it does not all come down to Windows vs. Mac OS X but also to the PC vs. the Macintosh platform.

At the bottom of this article, you will be able to find a video fragment depicting the latest exercise of humor as Microsoft's and Windows Vista's expense from Apple. Although traditionally, Get a Mac ads are offered under the QuickTime format on the official Apple website, the fresh advertisement is available exclusively on the web and is Flash-based. Also, the video ad is composed of two parts, a horizontal banner, generally placed at the top of the page and a vertical area on the right-hand side, featuring Justin Long (Mac) and John Hodgman (PC).

The message is simple: "Don't give up on Windows Vista!" Oops... my bad, I meant to say "Give up on Windows Vista!" Microsoft made Vista available in November 2006 for business customers and in January 2007 for the general consumers. The Redmond company's latest Windows client shipped over 88 million copies worldwide by October this year. October was the month when Apple released Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard, the successor of Tiger and the direct response to Windows Vista.

And with Leopard roaring in the background, with 2 million copies shipped in the first weekend alone, Apple has placed itself in a position where it claims to be able to advise users to simply let go of Windows Vista. Of course, at the same time, Apple supports running Vista on its Mac computers courtesy of Leopard and BootCamp.