(FORTUNE Magazine) – By the time the Super Bowl wound down to the final two- minute warning, the San Francisco 49ers' big lead over the Miami Dolphins took all the suspense out of the game for most of the estimated 110 million viewers. However, many advertising and computer industry executives were still on the edge of their seats, waiting for ABC to run Apple's new blockbuster commercial aimed at IBM's jugular. During last year's Super Bowl, Apple introduced the Macintosh with an Orwellian tour de force portraying IBM as Big Brother. This year the company readied a dramatic follow-up, canceled the ad a few weeks before the game, and then, after hundreds called to protest, decided to run it after all, paying $900,000 for air time. Finally, as the last seconds ticked off the clock, the network dropped it in: a long line of blindfolded executives marching lemming-like off a cliff, whistling dolefully, ''Heigh-ho, heigh-ho, it's off to work we go.'' The last in line decides to pull off the blindfold as a voice says something about the Macintosh Office. Apple says it did not expect to get the same wow response from ''Lemmings'' as it did with ''1984''--both created by the Los Angeles-based advertising agency Chiat/Day. Says Michael Murray, Apple's director of marketing for Macintosh, ''We are trying to change the old adage among purchasing managers that 'no one ever got fired for buying IBM' to one that says, 'but no one ever got promoted either.' '' Undoubtedly the surreal images of blindfolded executives smiling dumbly as they plunged off a cliff had some shock value. But how the typical viewer reacted and what he or she understood is less clear. ''Last year's ad was magnificent, but this one struck me as essentially negative and kind of mean spirited,'' says Frazier Purdy, creative director of Young & Rubicam Inc. More serious, adds Purdy, is whether many people got the message about the Macintosh Office as an alternative to IBM: ''I would have missed it completely if I hadn't read about it in the trade press.''