Jerry Seinfeld to Push Vista for $10 Million | Hacker News Reader

Jerry Seinfeld to Push Vista for $10 Million

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18 pointsblogimus33 comments

Someone's getting desperate. I mean, hiring a comedian to make your OS look good? That's not a good sign, is it?

I mean, it's an OS, not a gaming console. I don't want it to be funny, hip, cool, or otherwise "in" - if that's what I had wanted I'd have switched to Mac a long time ago. What I want is an OS that... works. But it seems that I'm asking for too much, so now I'm stuck between a rock and a hard place (win32 systems developer, who really prefers Ubuntu as an OS).

I was going to say the same thing, but I tried--to use a George-ism--doing the opposite. If Apple announced they were retiring "I'm a Mac, I'm a PC" in favour of something new with Jerry Seinfeld, would I be excited? No, but I wouldn't declare they were desperate.

So... MSFT are desperate, but although this feels like a desperation move to me as well, I don't know if it's entirely fair to say that hiring Jerry Seinfeld is an act of desperation in and of itself.

On the other hand:

If there's one surefire way to convince everyone Vista is cool, cutting edge and not liable to get frazzled by life's minor complications, it's hiring a 1990s sitcom star and professional kvetcher! Who, um, very visibly owned a series of Macs on his show.

http://gawker.com/5039828/mac+loving-seinfeld-endorsing-micr...

This reminded me of something that happens with tired regularity in advertising: Company executives hire the spokespersons that they identify with, instead of the spokespersons their customers identify with, because it gives them a thrill to brag that so-and-so endorses their product.

Another distinct possibility is that Microsoft knows exactly what they are doing, which is appealing to an older segment of the market, perhaps the IT managers that dictate corporate standards.

We may laugh, but they may be acting reasonably.

Well, Apple has long made its "bang" by focusing on what's cool. While their products also do just work and tend to get the job done, their cash comes from the fact that it's cool to get the job done the Mac way.

Microsoft's "name" comes (came?) from reliability in the business industry, where code you wrote almost two decades ago DOS 5 would run on Windows XP today (assuming you used their APIs for everything). Windows 2000 was a fast, snappy, and efficient OS that got the job done. Windows XP has a bit more "homey" but as the years passed and the service packs came in, it grew to fit that same role.

Windows has never been advertised as a truly "fun" OS until Vista's "the WOW starts now" campaign; unfortunately, I get the feeling that they're turning to the hip crowd because they've failed to stand out in any other way. From performance to reliability, Vista has flopped (I'm using it now, fulltime) - so they're looking for anything else that may save them some face.

So while it's no biggie for Apple to start advertising through Sienfeld, it is for Microsoft who have never been the sort of people to do this kind of thing.

The "XP" in Windows XP stands for "experience". Still, XP was not fun the day it launched and it's not fun now. Vista is not fun to use either.

And Microsoft's name... Well... They did have some fine products in the 80s.

This isn't just a-typical it's dangerous. They are trying to be something they are not.

Mac vs PC is not a symmetric fight.

If apple wins 1% of windows users, its a big win (somewhere around 10% increase in sales). But it doesn't work both ways. If windows 'steals' 25% of mac users, it's less then a 2% increase in windows sales. (& reaching those markets with airtime costs the same)

Windows could have beaten that just by reducing replacement time by a few months.

Going after Apple's (tiny) market, with their hands tied (Vista isn't fun) for meagre rewards isn't smart.

Furthermore, the more attention Microsoft calls to itself, the most it endangers itself. Because - with respect to Windows users - most people get wowwed over by what Mac does, and inertia stops them from switching. When Microsoft tries to push themselves, they make users move around, and Microsoft is the most endangered by that set-up.

Reminds me of high-end Backgammon strategy theory. One or the other of two players in match play benefits from volatility, and part of the struggle will always be that player attempting to mix things up while the other player attempts to settle things down.

Microsoft probably benefits from low volatility in the market, while Apple and Linux benefit from high volatility.

Exactly. Microsoft need to keep people from thinking & making decisions about OSs. Forget that there is a choice.

He's definitely a Mac guy, but I can't blame him. For $10m I'd promote cigarettes to cute at-risk kids.

I wouldn't say he's selling out, though. If he scabbed during the screen writer strike, then yes, he'd be a scab, but as it is, he's selling something a lot of people in a different industry think is sub-optimal. It'd be like having ads on your startup endorsing American cars or German wine.

Plus, the Mac ads are so self-satisfied and sleazy. Fight fire with fire.

You'd sell your soul and push cancer onto kids for $10M? Seriously?!

I respect what you are saying here, and I like to think that when confronted with a 33 ft (10 meter) high stack of 100 dollar bills I would react as you suggest. However, I suspect, looking at said stack, I would probably be seriously tempted.

10M is a lot of sleeping pills

Yet on the show, Jerry had a Mac.

Vague recollection...he had a IIc in the first season.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_IIc

I think it was a SE/30 or something in a similar case anyway.

There were various Macs through the years, including a SE/30, PowerMac 6100 and a Duo with Dock. The last one I remember was a 20th Anniversary, but that's so easily recognizable there may have been one after that I'm missing.

IIRC, in one of the DVD commentaries they talked about the Macs and noted that none of them were paid for by Apple, that's just what they used (or something to that effect). Sort of like his Superman promotions.

    'Microsoft explains the concept thusly: "Windows, Not Walls," which involves "break[ing] down barriers that prevent people and ideas from connecting." '

you can't have windows without walls :D So windows now has no walls(they are broken down) so now the windows just float around?(strange, but they do actually float around in Vista :D) Weird

you can't have windows without walls

http://tinyurl.com/5dtdn3

That looks like glass walls with no windows to me :D

Could we kill this thread? It's troll-bait bait.

Agreed. Here's an article with much less bias from InformationWeek:

http://www.informationweek.com/shared/printableArticle.jhtml...

i thought Vista would run poorly on my 3 year old comp since my $300 graphics card committed suicide some time ago and i'm forced to use the terribad onboard graphics. but recently i installed it on a spare harddrive and it runs smoothly, Aero and everything

in fact it runs better than XP O_O i'm sure the 2gb RAM i have helps. i'm guessing the cases of sluggishness that people have been reporting are mostly due to insufficient RAM or older driver issues

Sorry, but that's not the case for everyone.

I bought a new PC specifically because I attributed Vista's poor performance to my old PC's poor specs; but the new PC is almost exactly the same performance.... though it's way out there as far as specs are concerned.

Vista x64 SP1 running on a WD Raptor 150, 8GB of RAM, a E6750 running at 3.2GHz - and still terrible performance. XP on this machine flies like crazy, and Ubuntu is great. Only Vista can manage to take so long to copy files to and from my USB drive, spend half an hour to empty the recycle bin, or move a file over the network - it's I/O performance is a serious hole-in-the-tub kind of affair.

(Note: I'm a Windows guy. Ubuntu is my preferred OS/distro; but I'm on Windows 90% of my time thanks to my job (which I love) as a systems engineer for Windows platforms.)

I had some really egregious file IO performance when I first got a new computer with Vista on it, but that seems to have mysteriously cleared up. Winzip was especially bad taking minutes to open archives that took xp seconds to do on a much slower computer.

i heard the file stuff was an issue with the initial vista, but it was cleared up by SP1: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Windows_Vista#File...

that link also mentions that file operations on Vista may seem to take longer because the file transfer dialog stays up during the whole operation, whereas in XP it can be closed before the operation has actually completed

What's the deal with Apple? I can buy twice the hardware for 1/2 the price when I go the PC route.

What's the deal with a Porche? I can buy 4 cars for the price of a Porche.

Sort of a silly argument isn't it.

Even if this were true, and it's very not, the windows software stack would cause that hardware to run at 1/4 the speed.

The WSJ article on this says "Microsoft Corp., weary of being cast as a stodgy oldster by Apple Inc.'s advertising, is turning for help to Jerry Seinfeld."

He's 54. I'm not one to be ageist (cause I'm old) but MS can't seem to get anything right.

Every time I see the title I read it as:

Jerry Sentenced to Push Vista for $10 Million

The money would've been better spent had it gone to me.

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