The success of the Jerry Seinfeld and Bill Gates advertisements

(First published on IT World Canada blog)

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.