(2 votes, average: 9.5 out of 10)
Loading ...The success of the Jerry Seinfeld and Bill Gates advertisements
Most techies have seen both of the advertisements featuring Jerry and Bill, and have read all the commentary about how most people hated them. While I disliked them, I disliked them because I dislike their successful message, not because I thought the advertisements were a failure.
If you look at any of the Securities and Exchange filings from Microsoft over recent years (5 or so) you will notice that Microsoft lists Linux and Open Source as their greatest competitive threat. One of the things that Free/Libre and Open Source Software offers is this warm-and-fuzzy community feeling about it, that by using this software and supporting it that you are somehow being more of a humanitarian — almost a form of environmental and social consciousness to your software decisions.
Already being seen by many as the “evil empire”, Microsoft can’t fight that — or can they?
Bill Gates as an individual is seen by many people as a philanthropist. I’m not one of them, as I think the foundation is comparable to the average Canadian doing a bit of volunteer work in their “retirement” (something quite common) and donating less than a hundred dollars to charity a year. When we are talking about the person who was until recently the richest person in the world, we need to look at the money they donate as a percentage of their wealth. The Forbes article that documented Bill Gates at #3 listed Warren Buffet, the third trustee in the foundation after Bill and Melinda Gates, as the #1 richest person in the world.
There are other critiques of the foundation relating to how the investment arm of the foundation makes investments that can reverse the positive effects of the philanthropy arm. This critique was first exposed by LA Times staff writers Charles Piller, Edmund Sanders and Robyn Dixon in an article last year, and there has been quite a bit of analysis since.
There is also the strong ideological beliefs that Mr. Gates has around the impacts of “Intellectual Property”. Mr. Gates as an individual, and the foundation itself have investments in the pharmaceutical industry that have had multiple effects. There is the political lobbying that these companies, as well as other supported organizations, do in order to reduce the ability of poor countries to access cheaper drugs. International treaties allow a country to make drugs at the price of generics and ignore patents in order to fulfil the needs of a domestic health crisis. These treaties further allow a country without domestic production capacity to make use of the facilities of a different country, something that India has offered to Africa and other countries. The Western patent holders do not like this, so have been lobbying against this practise.
(Note: It is harder for people to track Mr. Gates personal investments, given Cascade Investment, Gates personal investment company has been granted confidential filing status by the US Security and Exchange Commission, which allows it to only divulge those stakes that have already been made public.)
A secondary effect is something I’ve observed first hand. One of my past clients was Planned Parenthood Federation in Canada at their 1 Nicholas St. Ottawa location. I ran a Linux-based LAN server for shared Internet access, email, file storage and printing. I was also managing the computers that their website was hosted on. At one point I was told that because the federation was receiving funds from the Gates foundation that they felt honour-bound to switch from the FLOSS based servers I was managing to a Microsoft infrastructure. Once the executive director who had hired me because of my views on the social impact of software left PPFC, it was clear that I was leaving as the final decision to switch to Microsoft was made. When the issue had first come up I was told that the additional costs of the Microsoft infrastructure (software costs and additional IT administration costs over what I was charging) would likely be higher than the amount of money they were receiving from the Gates foundation.
While a slower transition than their LAN services, you can also look at the Netcraft Web Server History to see how they switched from the Linux/Apache system I was offering them at 209.195.78.66 and 216.187.106.241 to their current Windows server. Compare to the report for www.flora.ottawa.on.ca which is the URL for my older personal site previously running on the same server.
The same type of thing is happening in Africa around drugs, according to a Wall St. Journal article (republished by IP-Health list)
“At a meeting in Africa last year, Mr. Love says he was struck by fears of officials from Botswana and elsewhere that pressing for access to generic drugs could jeopardize their chances for contributions. “They thought it would alienate the Gates foundation and they thought that was a problem,” Mr. Love says.
A report issued last year by the Commission on Macroeconomics and Health, chaired by economist Jeffrey Sachs, made a strong defense of intellectual-property protection as critical to continued investment in drug research and development. The Gates foundation was a major sponsor of the commission.”
Lets be honest. Most of what I am talking about is at a level of policy and politics far beyond what most normal people are willing to investigate or spend their time understanding. They will see their own governments cozying up to Gates (See article/photo of Steven Harper and Bill Gates) and believe that Mr. Gates (and the politicians who fall over each other to be associated with him) are doing wonderful things.
The positive message from the technology media could be summarized up in the first of two episodes so far that This Week In Tech did a reconstruction of the commercial. In episode 159 you have Ryan Block saying:
“You’re talking about the man who is doing more to better the world than possibly most governments possibly combined. This is a person whose philanthropic efforts are completely off the charts”.
This was in the context of a critique of the first commercial that had Latinos looking in at the rich people, and how other participants and media were suggesting that this was insulting to an ethnic group. Leo Laporte is quoting from an LA Times story by Maria Russo saying:
“Perhaps they’re supposed to represent the consumers “around the globe” that Microsoft is trying to “reconnect” with, but the depiction seems condescending and borderline offensive.
…
The Latinos are pressed up against the glass, fascinated by the action inside, but they do not appear to know who Gates and Seinfeld are. Are they too poor to own a TV? Do they represent the yearning Latino hordes trying to get in on the American consumerist dream?”
After Ryan made his comment about Gates, it seemed agreed by the panel that this meant that the Microsoft commercial couldn’t possibly have been insulting.
The tech media is now buzzing how the Seinfeild ads are being discontinued. I will not be surprised if Mr. Seinfeild is no longer in future episodes of this series of commercials, but Bill Gates still is. You can see Mr. Gates briefly in each of the “I am a PC” commercials that have been sent out thus far, and these also include a “world voices” type of feel to them as well.
As Ryan Block said earlier in that netcast, there is no better branding of Microsoft beyond their name than Bill Gates. Microsoft will continue to play off peoples perception of Mr. Gates as a philanthropist as a way to make buying Microsoft software socially conscious, their best defence against their greatest competitive threat: FLOSS.
Think I’m right-on or off the mark? Please reply in the comments and not only tell me where I’m right or wrong, but what you would like to see me writing about.
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Russell McOrmond is a self employed consultant, policy coordinator for CLUE: Canada’s Association for Free/Libre and Open Source Software, co-coordinator for Getting Open Source Logic INto Governments (GOSLING), and host for Digital Copyright Canada.
September 19th, 2008 at 11:57 am
Russell — Google “Bill Gates Planned Parenthood” and all will be made clear. The common “Bill Gates = humanitarian” image is easily and quickly dispelled by the truth, for those who are the least bit curious. In the specific case of Planned Parenthood, using Microsoft products is entirely appropriate. And to underline the idea that there is increasing collusion between governments and large companies (to the detriment of citizens everywhere), see http://www.storyofstuff.com. So the question for each of us is, as it was for Neo in The Matrix: Red Pill, or Blue Pill?
September 19th, 2008 at 12:41 pm
Gates is no philanthropist. he uses the foundation to buy press outlets and sell you that ’story’.
http://boycottnovell.com/2008/01/02/the-money-question-influence/
September 19th, 2008 at 2:05 pm
Just so that you are aware, the Boycottnovell site is funded by the FsF and is nothing more than a hate, site against Microsoft, Novell and proprietary software in general.
It’s also a shill site for Linux and the person running it, Mr. Schestowitz.
Go take a look for yourself.
September 19th, 2008 at 8:48 pm
The site is not funded by anybody. Enough with the libel.
September 19th, 2008 at 8:49 pm
Hmm… the ads were apparently created on a Mac?
http://www.roughlydrafted.com/2008/09/19/microsofts-im-a-pc-ads-created-on-macs/
September 19th, 2008 at 9:01 pm
Victor,
Thanks for the link to http://www.storyofstuff.com as I hadn’t seen this before. Well done and looks like it would get the message across to the general public quite well. It’s also a useful tool for those of us paying attention to the Canadian election to differentiate some of the platforms, given there are policies being promoted that affect the full cost accounting of the product life cycle.
Roy,
Thanks for participating on this blog and for what you have volunteered on your own site. I may not entirely share your evaluation of Novell and who may ultimately benefit the most from the Novell-Microsoft deal , but appear to share ideals. Don’t feel bad about what “Izzy” wrote. The presumption that opinions have to be funded is an interesting one. I’m not paid for my contributions here or on the other sites I contribute to, but have been accused of being paid for my positions in the past.
I wish politics would become more mature. People can disagree on policy without being disagreeable and without misrepresenting the truth.
September 19th, 2008 at 9:14 pm
Rusell,
There are attempts from many directions to use smears to degrade the message. They used to try this against Groklaw, claiming it’s an IBM site.
September 20th, 2008 at 8:43 am
Roy,
The amusing thing with the claim that it is a funded opinion is that it is harder to get the money on this side of the policy debate. Much of the financial benefits of FLOSS to customers comes in getting rid of some legacy middle-men, and those increasingly unnecessary folks are far more willing to put money in trying to slow down the inevitable.
I’m the volunteer coordinator for CLUE: Canada’s Association for FLOSS http://cluecan.ca/policy and would like that to become a paid position. That would allow me to dedicate far more time to this important policy work, and not have to be doing technical consulting and system administration to pay the bills. Unfortunately all the major vendors believe that since they have people in Washington that they don’t also need people in Ottawa, something that is incorrect on many fronts.
While more and more of the economy is moving to transparency, it is something that seems to be happening grassroots without as much of the financial support from some of the private sector beneficiaries of this transformative change as I would like to see.
On another topic, we have someone from Novell that comes to our GOSLING meetings from time to time. I’ve chatted with him about various boycotts. I’m of the opinion that the deal that Novell did with Microsoft was an interesting thin-edge-of-the-wedge plan which may have the longer-term effect of dragging Microsoft deeper into the FLOSS ecosystem than Microsoft’s intention of keeping customers out. Microsoft is already a stage-1 FLOSS company (participating in knowledge sharing with customer base via their Shared Source initiative), and it seems inevitable to me that they will continue through the stages like all other legacy proprietary vendors.
On the other hand, I have to bite my tongue when IBM comes up given they are the company most responsible for software patents in most countries. They are seen as allies on the software code front, but are largely opponents on the political code front. My hope is that the folks higher-up will eventually recognize how much of their business relies on knowledge transparency and direct their lawyers/etc to be productive rather than detrimental to their own business interests.
September 20th, 2008 at 9:11 am
> The presumption that opinions have to be funded is an
> interesting one.
Agreed, which is why I find it funny that Roy Schestowitz labels anyone who disagrees with him as a “Microsoft Apologist” or “Microsoft Shill”.
It’s interesting when the shoe is on the other foot, isn’t it Roy?
Roy Schestowitz is the personification of hypocrisy.
September 20th, 2008 at 6:46 pm
“I’m a PC … running Ubuntu.”
Seriously, Microsoft is really losing it in the evil stakes these days. They used to be really good at evil. Now Apple is kicking their backsides for evil. When Steve Jobs goes “MuWAAAhahahaha!”, the brainwashed minions listen. His henchmen are really loyal, not just getting paid to be. Poor Ballmer.
September 22nd, 2008 at 7:21 pm
The add at the top of the page is for an HP computer with Windows on it. ????