hiester.com

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.