Microsoft's Non-advertising Advertising with Jerry Seinfeld

In an attempt to distance themselves form almost everyting, Microsoft have released an advert featuring Jerry Seinfeld and Bill Gates. The advert is like the Seinfeld observation about the advert for Dockers that didn't mention the product.

The advert does not mention any of Microsoft's products and features a rather wooden Bill Gates. That Bill Gates is prepared to appear in a rather wooden fashion looking rather geekish is something but otherwise the advert is completely pointless.

Whereas pointlessness was the point of the Seinfeld comedy series, Microsoft is facing stiffer and stiffer competition and, despite its near monopoly is having a job justifying its operating systems and office suites in a time of increased possibilites made through the web.

Apple has done a good job of beginning to take back market share form Microsoft in recent years. As their handheld devices work and work well, so the public's trust in the Apple brand increases. Likewise, Google is muscling in on Microsoft's turf with a new free browser. Furthermore, Linux is becoming more important as an operating system platform.

In short, Microsoft's market is being eroded and the need for packaged software products are dwindling in an age where more and more applications are web based and Microsoft has a shrinking share of the web.

With this in mind, does a quirky, pointless advert just make Microsoft appear quirky & pointless?

What do you think?

Enough of the new search engines - how about a new browser?

There have been a number of interesting search engine offerings over the last few months and we wanted to write about something new.

Increasingly, we are finding that customers are interacting with the Internet in different ways and that their next purchase might not necessarily come from an interaction with a search engine. Video now dwarfs search with 10 billion pieces of online video were viewed in December 2007 & with 141 million Americans viewing video online every month (did you ever wonder why Google paid $1.65bn for YouTube?) as does social networking (with over 100 million people using Facebook alone). The common elements to all of these facets of customer interaction is the brpwser as everyone needs a browser to use video, social media and the search engines.

If the aim of the game is to influence people as early as possible during their Internet experience then the browser hould be one of the most important things. Browser wars, however, are old hat - Netscape bowed out of the race years ago and today Internet Explorer & Firefox have the market sewn up between them (IE had 72.15% of the market & Mozilla 19.83% in August 2008 according to hitslink.com). In this environment, a move by Google came out of left field. That said, moving into the browser seems like a logical step for a company like Google which needs to protect its advertising revenues.

This move could have real repurcussions for Mozilla which, until now has had a close relationship with Google (their offices are across the road from Google's) and, as such, might show Google's intent to topple Microsoft's dominance. If this is the case, then the next logical step to influence people beofre they are online is for Google to release an open source operating system. You heard it here first.