Microsoft was happier than you might have thought with Apple's big iPhone 6 announcement day. The company rolled out another ad slamming Siri as being inferior to Windows Phone's Cortana digital assistant, and gotten big viewer numbers.
Starting earlier this month, Microsoft has been running an aggressive ad campaign touting Cortana as being superior to Siri. It chose Apple rollout day to release the latest one, called "Groundhog Day," in which Cortana can remember useful information such as appointments, favorite restaurants, and news topics, while Siri can't. The ad portrays Siri as dim-witted, not even remembering Cortana's name.
As of 11 am this morning, the ad has already gotten 2.5 million page views on YouTube, well ahead of the 779,000 page views the second most-viewed ad has gotten since September 1.
Clearly, it was a big day for Microsoft as well as for Apple.
As for Microsoft's charges against Siri, I find them generally accurate. In my testing, Cortana easily beats Siri in a variety of tasks.
Whether that translates into increased Windows Phone sales is another question. But at this point, Microsoft will take any win it can against Apple in mobile.