And I thought Gates was retired. WTF?? And, if you read the whole piece you’ll realize that all it will take for this whole campaign to backfire is for one already rich celebrity to balk at the offer and say he prefers a Mac. I can see it now. “Actor says he’d rather use a Mac rather than take $10 million.” It would be a marketing disaster and it is waiting to happen.
Microsoft has set aside $300 million for an ad campaign featuring once-funny comedian Jerry Seinfeld in a series of advertisements targeting Apple. [Insert “master of his domain” joke here. -Ed.]
According to the Wall Street Journal, Microsoft will pay Seinfeld $10 million to appear in a series of ads for its “Windows, Not Walls” campaign that will feature Seinfeld and Bill Gates, Microsoft’s chairman. According to AdWeek, other highly-relevant comics like Chris Rock and Will Ferrell may also appear in the ads.
Wired notes that Microsoft’s “choice of Seinfeld was an effort to avoid pandering to the kids with ‘a celebrity that was too hip.'” Mission accomplished.
Found by Paul Salzman who notes that Jerry had a Mac on his show in every episode. What a bunch of boneheads!
Well to Microsoft this amount of money is less than pocket change. This has monkey boys finger prints all over it.
Jerry never even touched the mac in the background as far as I can remember… He can work that into his jokes.
True John, we should go ahead and believe that everything we see on TV is reality. I’m sure that Seinfeld’s life is EXACTLY the same as the TV show, and that everything in his TV show apartment is EXACTLY the same as his real life apartment.
In this one John, you are the bonehead, sorry to say.
Doesn’t that make the ad better if a guy who was always surrounded by Apple products is now doing Windows ads?
I’m surprised it’s taken this long for Microsoft to start doing damage control. They really need to stop the Vista FUD.
I’d give up my Mac for $10 million dollars.
Any less than that and it’s iffy.
#6…you’ve shown us what kind of a user you are, that you can be purchased, now it’s just a matter of negotiation. 😉
(Kramer making his usual zooming entrance into Jerry’s apartment)
KRAMER: JERRY! I just got this GREAT deal on a whole truck load of Vista PCs!!!
JERRY: Please…tell me you didn’t buy’em from a guy named Gates.
KRAMER: Uhhhhh, how’d you know??
JERRY: He’s been pulling that scam for years, can’t unload them any other way. By the way, how’d you pay for them?
KRAMER: Uhhhhhh, I sort of borrowed your American Express Card.
#6 – Me too, then I’d buy 2 or 3 new ones. Can you say 8 core tower, Xserve, Xsan, and Final Cut Pro 6 with an AJA doing 10 bit uncompressed HD? Yummy!
Seinfeld is one of the crazy ones.
I’ll reserve judgment until I actually see an ad. They might be clever and memorable. Or it might be flushing 1/30th of their Vista Defense ad budget.
Jerry already did an ad for HP laptops a while back. If he’s a mac user, he’s keeping it a secret.
>>an ad campaign featuring once-funny
>>comedian Jerry Seinfeld
I must have missed the “funny” part.
They could just make the ads full of lies and exaggerations about how awful OS X is. Its been working for Apple…
Hmmm. Couldn’t they take the $300 million, and offer it to all the hardware manufacturers as an incentive to update their device drivers for Vista?
I’d use Vista if:
1. It worked with my hardware.
2. It ran as fast or faster than WinXP.
3. It could run all my old software.
I really don’t care how many comedians they pay to like it.
Wonder what the Bubble Boy uses.
#15
1. Hardware support outside printers and gadgets is excellent. Most driver issues were resolved within the first few months after the consumer launch, just like every other Windows release.
2. It already is:
http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,2845,2302499,00.asp
3. Most software should work fine, although some things like virus scanners, disk defragmenters, etc need to be Vista compatible. If you use the 64-bit version you lose 16-bit app support, although you can still emulate old DOS applications with programs like DOSBox.
I’ve found Vista’s backwards compatibility to be excellent, at least for gaming.
These are exactly the sort of questions and issues that Microsoft needs to address with these ad campaigns.
Briljant move of MS. They haven’t payed anything yet, and they already are all over the press. For free. They start to learn from Stevie. Let Stevie pay for the ads, let MS talk about copying it, targeting Apple, whatever, and look who’s there? The media, stumbling over their feet to be on top of… of what?
#17 – Else
>>2. It already is:
I don’t know about “gaming benchmarks”, as I don’t play that many games.
But for everyday use, Vista is a TOTAL DOG. I have one Vista machine, and I go to great lengths not to use it. Ugh. I had another Vista machine (which was also a dog), and I upgraded it back to XP. Now it’s faster than a speeding bullet. I have a third XP machine, with about half the resources of either of the Vista ones, and the performance is brisk, it never gives me “xxx NOT RESPONDING” coffee breaks, and I have no problems at all.
Maybe for gaming freaks and people who want to use a 64-bit OS on a virtual supercomputer, Vista has some advantages.
For the vast majority of home and business users though, it’s a total POS. I’d go back to Windows 3.1 before I’d get another Vista machine.
#19 – Ah Mustard, back to your old FUD spreading ways, eh? We’ve missed you…
Spielberg replaced the guns with walkie-talkies in ET. Maybe MS will pay to digitally replace Jerry’s Macs with PC’s in all episodes of Seinfeld.
Let’s wait until the ads appear before judging. Give Seinfeld credit though, he knows how to make a buck.
I bet Jerry can sell more computers than Lloyd Braun!
#20 – Jerk
Hey. I’m just saying. And I’m not the only one. YMMV.
Maybe if living in Mom’s basement playing video games is your life, 64-bit Vista is the OS for you.
For the rest of us, not so much.
And who’s calling whom a “bonehead”??
HAW!!
#24
the jerk store called and they’re running out of you
I would guess that %95 of the people that bark about Vista being a dog, have never actually tried using it.
I have 64-bit Vista on my home machine, and I can honestly say;
#1. I personally, have never seen Vista crash.
#2. The speed is just fine, more memory is better.
#3. It plays games very well, including 64 bit variants like Crysis 64.
What’s not to love about Vista? The advertising, and thats about it.
SKL
Hmmmm. No one finds it ironic that Seinfeld was once featured in an Apple ad. Oh well, back to insults.
Only 16 more days until Spore. Wonder if that’ll run 64 bit native?
Mister Mustard is totally right. You need expensive hardware if you want Vista to do anything other than sit there and look pretty. And then good luck with your old software once you get the new hardware. Though I guess if all you ever use is Microsoft Word every once in a while you might think it works pretty well.
Because I am such a total and complete CHEAPSKATE, I still run Win98SE, but as fewer and fewer new pieces of hardware and software will work with that, I may find myself trying XP sometime soon.
Just as with most high-end games, the top commercial operating systems are designed for _next_year’s_ computer hardware. This has been part of MS’s strategy since the beginning. (Don’t worry if it’s slow, with Moore’s Law, next year’s hardware will run it just fine.)
That picture shows a very old Mac. It’s either a non-working prop, or it’s there because Apple paid the studio for some product placement. It’s the same deal as having Jeff Goldblum hack into the alien spaceship with a Macintosh laptop (oh really?) in the “Independence Day” flick. I suspect the Soup Nazi was a product placement also (Al Yaganeh’s been selling a lot of soup at Costco these days).
Maybe Seinfeld thinks it’s funny (+money).
I could smell Vista months before it was released, and bought a notebook and desktop with XP to replace my old Windows 98 machines. I sold the nice Sony Windows 98 notebook on eBay and the old desktop has Ubuntu on it. Ubuntu isn’t bad, except that Adobe hasn’t written a decent Flash player for Linux yet.