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The Microsoft TV commercials featuring Bill Gates and Jerry Seinfeld trying to connect to “real people” are being pulled. In episode 2 of the ads, Bill Gates asks, “Tell me again why we’re doing this?” Seinfeld replies, “you and I are a little out of it. You’re living in some kind of moon house hovering over Seattle like the mother ship. I got so many cars I get stuck in my own traffic.”

The fact is that Gates is not “out of it” at all. He recently retired from Microsoft to devote more time to his foundation. He is passionate about solving a problem that kills three million real people every year: malaria. In a 2005 New Yorker article by Michael Specter, Gates says, “It just blows my mind how little money has been spent on malaria research.” The Gates foundation has spent somewhere in the area of US $10 billion on global health issues. So why does Gates go along with an ad campaign that paints him as a detached hedonist when he so clearly is nothing of the sort?

The other pieces of this confused ad campaign are coming to light. There are the celebrities claiming “I’m a PC.” Getting Deepak Chopra to soberly look into the camera and claim, “I’m a PC” has the momentary effect of making the Mac ads look juvenile. I say momentary because when I clicked through to the site I encountered two glaring problems.

1. The pop-up window where (I presume) a video testimonial is supposed to play was blank–just a black box. This was on Firefox 2.0. I tried the site on Internet Explorer 6 (the only version of IE I’m allowed to use on my work computer) and I got the same result, a black box.
2. My CPU usage shot up to 100% and I couldn’t do anything on my PC until I closed the window with the broken PC ad. I guess that’s the high quality Silverlight software leaking memory like a Xenical clinical trial patient.

Then there’s the “Windows vs. Walls” portion of the campaign with some of the worst copywriting I’ve ever seen. I felt like I was reading The Bridges of Madison County. For instance:

But, most importantly, to connect all of us to the four corners of our own digital lives and to each other.

What the hell does that even mean? The four corners of our own digital lives?

To go on doing the little stuff, the big stuff, the crazy stuff and that ridiculously necessary stuff.

Ridiculously necessary? So things that are necessary are worthy of ridicule?

An approach dedicated to engineering the absence of anything that might stand in the way…of life

Say what? Engineering the absence? I feel a Danny DeVito (auditioning for the role of Louie De Palma) rant coming on–”Who wrote this shit?”

Today, more than one billion people worldwide have Windows®. Which is just another way of saying we have each other.

Oh, I get it now, Windows® is human. I guess that’s why it is so deeply flawed.

A note to the model who is looking through the “window” he just chopped out of the wall on the ad site: Dude, next time you take your reciprocating saw to a wall filled with fiberglass insulation, you might want to put on some gloves, a dust mask and goggles. I predict OSHA will be the next regulatory agency to knock on Microsoft’s door.

(Disclosure: My everyday computer is an IBM Thinkpad running Microsoft Windows XP. I’m not a Mac snob. However, I do need to replace my laptop soon and I will probably get a Mac. I don’t like the idea of having to shell out a lot of extra cash for new licenses for things like Adobe Creative Suite, which I use daily, but I probably will anyway.)

When a company has to issue a press release to explain its new TV ad, you know it’s a stinker. The nice thing about Apple’s Mac vs. PC ads with Justin Long and John Hodgman: they just work. The response to the vanguard of Microsoft’s $300 million campaign has been universal befuddlement. I’d bet that the Google bot scooped up more question marks this week than it has all year. The blogosphere was one big “Huh?” on Friday. Shoe Circus? Conquistador? Moist, chewy computers that you can eat? Bill Gates shaking his ass??? Even the pointy-headed semioticians at Cahiers du Cinema would strain to find any meaning in this fiasco.

According to Microsoft, it will all make sense later. This sounds like a typical Microsoft operating system release. You’ll get it later. We just have a few bugs to work out. Like firing the turkey who came up with the TV commercial. This is classic Microsoft. Try to copy another company’s successful innovation, only to find that when you’re finished, the world has moved on. Mac -> Windows. Netscape -> Internet Explorer. Flash -> LiquidMotion Silverlight. iPod -> Zune. Google -> Live Search. Why did it take Microsoft five years to release one new version of Internet Explorer? They had to sit back and wait to see what great new features Firefox came up with, then try to cram them into Internet Explorer.

While Microsoft was taking a magic carpet ride back to the halcyon days of Seinfeld’s 1990’s, Google, with little fanfare other than a comic book introduction, released its own web browser called Chrome. Out of the gate, it is the fastest browser on the market. I’m sure Microsoft will release a version of Internet Explorer that employs all of Chrome’s innovations (e.g. multi-process architecture vs. multi-threaded). We’ll just have to wait five or ten years.

There is a billboard that I see every time I exit the Schuylkill Expressway in Philadelphia. Thousands of people each day see this billboard next to 30th Street Station at exit 344, which says,

“Me, my doctor, and Aetna. Together we’re making history.”

They’re also making Strunk and White roll in their graves.