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The appalling Microsoft ad campaign featuring Jerry Seinfeld and Bill Gates that was crafted by Crispin Porter + Bogusky has apparently run off the rails and is being canceled, or redefined, or something:
Remember those awful Microsoft ads with Jerry Seinfeld and Bill Gates? Well, now you can forget them. Microsoft flacks are desperately dialing reporters to spin them about "phase two" of the ad campaign — a phase, due to be announced tomorrow, which will drop the aging comic altogether. Microsoft’s version of the story: Redmond had always planned to drop Seinfeld.
Ah, the old "I meant to do that" defense. The only flaw in the alibi is why did they bother wasting everyone’s time with "phase one" in the first place?
By the way, if you haven’t seen the second episode of this foolishness, check out this long form Web version of the actual TV ads:
Disparaging your customers, claiming the "out-of-touch" crown, being unfunny – what’s not to like? Unless you are Microsoft who forked over $300 million for it.
Update: The NY Times’ Stuart Elliott apparently ingested an overdose of CP+B Kool-Aid and is now directly channeling "Phase Two." Here’s a clue, fellas: if you have to explain it, it is too complex for advertising. Still, there’s one fun part:
Beginning on Thursday night, visitors to windows.com will be able to upload video clips and photographs demonstrating how they, too, are PCs.
They spend most of their time crashed or snoozing? Or stopped at a UAC prompt? Or maybe moving really, really slowly? The possibilities for hilarity at Microsoft’s expense will be endless.
Yahoo’s proposed deal with Google to run some Google search ads may be only for the USA and Canada, but European Union Competition Commissioner Neelie Kroes has apparently spotted something there to raise her hackles:
European Union antitrust watchdogs are looking into a planned deal between Internet giants Google Inc and Yahoo Inc to share some advertising revenue.
"In mid-July, we decided to open a preliminary investigation on our own initiative into potential effects of the Google-Yahoo agreement on competition in the European Economic Area (EEA) market," said Jonathan Todd, a spokesman for European Competition Commissioner Neelie Kroes.
Neelie always has her hackles raised, of course, but while I think there’s a lot of antitrust gold to be mined in Google’s stranglehold on search, the deal with Yahoo is hardly a poster child. Instead, how about a thousand examples similar to Sourcetool.com as described by Joe Nocera last Friday in the NY Times?
There’s even more Google antitrust gold in the latest whine of the World Association of Newspapers (WAN) if you ignore their shortsighted view that somehow preventing the Yahoo deal will save them from Google. Reading between the lines it’s entirely clear that they currently in thrall to Google and Yahoo’s independence or lack thereof is irrelevant.
I also see that that some of the always pesky US state attorneys general have joined the Google hunt also using the Google-Yahoo deal as an excuse. Now if there exist any greater publicity hounds than Neelie Kroes, it’s this crew and they certainly aren’t going to limit themselves to odd deals with Yahoo. If I were a betting man, I’d say that Google is shortly in for a world of antitrust hurt and no one will have greater schadenfreude than Microsoft.
The received wisdom from Microsoft is that Windows 7 is set for a January, 2010 release, but Andy Patrizio at InternetNews has some buzz that it might be much earlier:
Publicly, Microsoft has said Windows 7, the successor operating system to the firm’s much maligned Windows Vista, will not ship until early 2010, but its internal calendar has June 3, 2009 as the planned release date, InternetNews.com has learned.
Also, Microsoft will use its Professional Developer’s Conference in late October as the launch platform for the first public beta of Windows 7. Microsoft plans to release the first beta on October 27, the first day of the show, when Chief Software Architect Ray Ozzie will be the keynote speaker.
Heck, why not? Windows 7 seems to be merely a cleaned up version of Vista, so why should it take Microsoft any longer than June 2009 to deliver it? The most annoying Microsoft problem in Vista was the User Access Control (UAC) prompts which Microsoft, in a fit of madness, implemented to purposely annoy end users and that’s easy to turn off as any perceptive Vista user has already discovered.
On the other hand, the really significant problems with Vista are with the availability (or lack thereof) of partner device drivers. Only time really cures or at least softens that ill, so longer might well be better.
John R. Wilke at the WSJ reports today that the US Department of Justice has retained top rank litigator Sanford Litvack to help them determine whether there are grounds for antitrust action against Google:
The Justice Department has quietly hired one of the nation’s best-known litigators, former Walt Disney Co. vice chairman Sanford Litvack, for a possible antitrust challenge to Google Inc.’s growing power in advertising.
Mr. Litvack’s hiring is the strongest signal yet that the U.S. is preparing to take court action against Google and its search-advertising deal with Yahoo Inc. The two companies combined would account for more than 80% of U.S. online-search ads.
…
For weeks, U.S. lawyers have been deposing witnesses and issuing subpoenas for documents to support a challenge to the deal, lawyers close to the review said. Such efforts don’t always mean a case will be brought, however.Mr. Litvack, who was the Justice Department antitrust chief under President Jimmy Carter, has been asked to examine the evidence gathered so far and to build a case if the decision is made to proceed, the lawyers close to the review said.
It isn’t clear whether a U.S. challenge would target the Google-Yahoo deal alone or take on broader aspects of Google’s conduct in the growing online-advertising business.
And the last part is the rub of course, since overturning the Google-Yahoo deal (which Microsoft has vociferously opposed) would only really hurt Yahoo, while an investigation of abuses of Google’s dominant market position could result in a world of hurt for them and renewed life for Microsoft’s online advertising ambitions.
