Thursday, Microsoft kicked off its $300 million campaign, which is intended to bring improvements to Windows Vista’s image, the operating system that the company launched in January last year.
Created by advertising agency Crispin Porter + Bogusky, the marketing campaign’s first ad features household comedian Jerry Seinfeld alongside Microsoft tycoon Bill Gates.
The commercial is only a small part of a larger project that aims at changing the current perception people have of the product.  Corporate vice president at Microsoft, Brad Brooks, stated that presently, what the Vista brand stands for has been defined only by its competition, namely by Apple Incorporated. The latter released, in 2006, a "Mac vs. PC" advertisement that showed Personal Computers as being out of fashion and unable to catch up to the trendy Mac, thus tarnishing the Microsoft product’s image.
Seinfeld and Gates are featured shopping at a discount shoe store, making humorous conversations. The ad, which was first aired during the first National Football League game of the season, ends with the tagline `the future delicious'.
In addition to this marketing campaign, Microsoft is making further efforts to entice consumers into using their products, since all of the company’s major manufacturing partners have been working on improving PCs so that they take less time both to start up and to shut down. Moreover, they plan on reducing the number of steps necessary to set up a Personal Computer. Consequently, Hewlett-Packard and Dell will be pre-installing Microsoft's Windows Live Suite of Internet programs on the machines.