Microsoft’s Second Seinfeld Ad Reimages Bill Gates

The second installment of Microsoft ‘s “Seinfeld” campaign launched Thursday night during the reality TV series Big Brother. Like the first commercial in the $300 million campaign staring the well-known comedian Jerry Seinfeld, the spot didn’t discuss Windows.The two-and-a-half-minute ads show Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates and Seinfeld living with a typical American suburban family in hopes of “connecting with people.” The cast of characters includes three kids, a cranky grandma with many skills, and mom and dad.

“Why are we doing this?” Gates asks Seinfeld. The comedian responds with his trademark humor about how the duo is out of touch with regular people, referring to Gates’ “moon house hovering over Seattle” and his own vehicle collection that causes him to “get stuck in my own traffic.” The bottom line, Seinfeld says, “We need to connect with real people.”

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7 comments September 13th, 2008

Yahoo Follows AOL with Open Web Strategy

Following in the footsteps of AOL earlier this week, Yahoo on Friday talked about its plans to open its online services to third-party developers.Yahoo calls it the Yahoo Open Strategy, or YOS for short. The mission is to “deliver open, industry-leading platforms that attract the most publishers and developers.”

The YOS platform aims to harness Yahoo’s audience of a half a billion users per month. The plan is to keep open Yahoo’s content repositories to the innovations of the developer community. Yahoo first announced the initiative in April, calling it a major rewiring of Yahoo that blows the doors wide open.

“Yahoo is trying to position itself as a distribution vehicle for third-party content,” said Greg Sterling, principal analyst at Sterling Market Intelligence. “This is not a break with anything or a change of direction, it’s just a continuation of what they have been talking about for a few months. It would have been really novel if they had done this two years ago.”

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Add comment September 13th, 2008