Seinfeld gets the Blue Screen of Death

Microsoft seems to have come to its senses: It's cancelling the pointless Seinfeld-Gates ads and replacing them with ads that take direct aim at Apple's "I'm a Mac" campaign. Microsoft claims this was its intent all along. Are we really supposed to believe that the grand plan called for Microsoft to pay Seinfeld $10 million for two pointless ads that ran for two weeks?

That $10 million payment to Seinfeld for disastrous work is rivalled only by the hundreds of millions paid to the CEOs of top financial firms for running our economy into a ditch. Seinfeld will be laughing all the way to the bank (if he can find one still in business, that is), even if TV viewers didn't get a chuckle out of his work.

The new ad campaign is supposed to directly take on Apple's "I'm a Mac" series, says Computerworld. For example, in one commercial, a Microsoft engineer with a striking resemblance to the PC character in the Mac ads, says directly into the camera: "Hello, I'm a PC, and I've been made into a stereotype."

I haven't seen the new ads yet, so I'll withhold judgment. But they certainly sound superior to the first part of the campaign. Ads about nothing yield exactly that: Nothing.

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