Bill and Jerry’s excellent (not!) adventure

by Jeff Dorsch, September 9th, 2008, 7:00 am

Maybe you saw it over the weekend. Fresh on the heels of its “Mojave Experiment” marketing ploy for Windows Vista, Microsoft just started running its first TV commercial featuring Jerry Seinfeld and Bill Gates.

The commercial is decidedly Seinfeld-esque, to say the least. Like the Seinfeld show, some people will find it rich in popular culture-based humor and non sequiturs, while others will find it confusing and not funny.

Many wonder how this commercial promotes Windows or Vista. In truth, it really doesn’t. As this blog post notes, the 90-second spot is meant to introduce a series of commercials starring Gates and Seinfeld, and I’m sure they’ll get around to mentioning Vista at some point.

Meanwhile, there was a spate of news stories marking the 10th anniversary of Google’s incorporation. All the search giant has to do is to get older, and the media’s all over it! BTW, Microsoft is nearly 33 years old (not much younger than when a certain stand-up comedian launched a TV series called The Seinfeld Chronicles).

Google got a lot of attention last week for launching Google Chrome, its open-source Web browser. Chrome will compete with not only Microsoft’s Internet Explorer, Apple’s Safari, and the Opera browser, but also Firefox, Mozilla’s open-source browser that has benefited from a lot of financial and technical support from Google. The search behemoth just renewed its development agreement with Mozilla for another three years, so Chrome may not crush Firefox in the near future.

Chrome is intended as a key piece of infrastructure for Google’s Web-based tools, such as Google Docs, Gears, and Gmail.

I wouldn’t put all my chips on Chrome to overtake Internet Explorer or even Firefox in the next few years. Not everything Google touches turns to Internet gold. Google Video wasn’t a world-beater, so the company went out and bought YouTube.

Funny how Google doesn’t run any TV commercials — all it has to do is to inadvertently spill the news of the new browser, and the media goes wild in promoting the (free) product. Of course, there was a lot of savvy marketing and PR work behind that “accidental” launch. The kind of thing you’d expect from a brash 10-year-old.