Microsoft and Fox cooked up a sponsorship of Seth and Alex's Almost Live Comedy Show. Seth and Alex of Family Guy fame. Not exactly your "this sitcom rated for corporations" kind of duo right? I guess South Park wasn't available? Well I guess after seeing a rehearsal of the cutting edge comedy they dropped the sponsorship like virus infected Vista PC and ran back to Seattle.

Microsoft isn't cool enough to pull that off anyways. Especially after seeing horrid stuff like the "Windows 7 Party" video. Microsoft couldn't have pulled off sponsoring reruns of "The Golden Girls" (R.I.P. Bea!). Balmer is not "Steve Jobs" cool. Balmer is a goofball who reminds me of a junior high school gym teacher. I'm sure he's a perfectly find person. He just doesn't seem like a leader or a visionsary type of guy to me. Gates didn't seem to be much of a leader to me either, but he sure had the visionary/schemer thing down. The execution of his visions made lots of money, but never inspired the rabbid loyalty or fandom of the users of his technology.

There was a saying at the huge bank I used to work at back in the early 90's, "No one ever got fired for using IBM". That changed about8 years ago to "No one ever got fired for using Microsoft". None of that inspired much excitement or loyalty to those brands. Especially when actually trying to use products from either of those companies. Most of what I saw from an IT perspective were lack luster barely working solutions and a whole lot of empty promises.

Every OS Microsoft has delivered has over-promised and under-delivered. That's not hip, or cool. Having your product pitched by an annoying "hello kitty-like" 7 year old girl on TV. Not cool. Having to lie to people by renaming Vista to Mohave to trick them into liking a product. Not cool. Having Bill Gates wiggle his butt to Sinfield. Not cool. Having your all of your OS's require at least 3 or 4 security programs just to block or clean viruses and malware. Not cool.

Microsoft needs to stop marketing all together. Its been horrible and creepy at best. At worst you just end up horrified yourselves because you are so out of touch. I guess this is the kind of marketing execution we should all be expecting from the creators of such great hits like Windows ME and Vista though. I hope the next marketing team you work with gets paid a lot of money and tells Balmer that the quiter Microsoft is the better off they are.

When you actually make a product that isn't the same old crap and actually has something new and exciting that isn't riddled with quality problems, then maybe... MAYBE... you can put an ad in the classifieds. Start slow OK?