twitter's Journal: Seinfeld Ads Represent a Core Failure.

Channel Web, responding to the early end of the latest big money ads and Vista's continued problems, declares the Seinfeld add campaign a failure.

Get a grip. The only way to fix Vista's PR woes is to fix the product itself. Read my lips. It hasn't worked properly from day one. Driver issues and compatibility issues have made the product in far too many cases simply unusable.

Great advertising or marketing can make a good product into a blockbuster product. But it can not transform a bad product into a great product. What's ironic is that Microsoft was once considered a master marketer that was able to marginalize the far superior Macintosh experience with flat out more aggressive marketing and salesmanship.

The author is delusionally optimistic about M$'s ability to fix things. Vista has been on the market for two years and was in development for at least five. If they can't get it right in seven years, they never will. A reasonable person would look at Vista's DRM and question M$ commitment to making things work for the user or sanity. Then again, the author believes XP can be secured. Only someone able to ignore that kind of failure could believe a system that is so openly hostile and restrictive will ever work.

Update: Steve Ballmer says M$ is all about advertisers too.

When Joe Sixpack's media has figured this out

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Then Microsoft's got trouble. [newsweek.com]

Completely separate thing: People who understand funny realize that we laugh because we dare not cry. That's what makes this clip [youtube.com] so hilarious. Use it next time some Microsoft drone mentions that their software owns the market.