I just watched the first entry in Microsoft's $300 million ad campaign designed to counteract Apple's "Get a Mac" ads. It appears to be one of a series of ads that will tell a story, if you can manage to watch all of them. This type of ad campaign has been successful for other products. The most memorable example may be Taster's Choice, which used a soap opera-style series of ads about a couple meeting cute over a cup of coffee. Each ad was designed to leave you wondering whether a chance meeting would progress into a relationship, or whether they would go their separate ways.

Courtesy of Microsoft

The Microsoft ad features Bill Gates and Jerry Seinfeld running into each other at Shoe Circus, a discount shoe store. There's lots of talk about shoes, but the only reference to computers is Jerry's wistful wish that computers could be tasty and edible, like cake. I was amused that Bill is a "Shoe Circus Club Town" member who gets big top points for every purchase, but the ad otherwise fell short for me. I expected something that would be fun and hold my interest, but it failed on both counts.

Microsoft says "the new campaign will highlight how Windows has become an indispensible part of the lives of a billion people around the world." The ad agency, Crispin, Porter + Bogusky, says the ads are designed to spark a conversation about Windows.

The ad just left me thinking about shoes.

The Taster's Choice commercials worked because they were engaging, and left us wondering what would happen with the couple. The Microsoft ad just left me wondering who thought the sight of Bill Gates wiggling his caboose would be appealing or funny or an enticement to watch the rest of the ad series.

Here's a link to a YouTube video of the ad.

What do you think about Microsoft's ad campaign? Share your thoughts by posting a comment below.

I’ve been following the news and reviews of Google’s new web browser, Chrome. While the Chrome beta is currently only available for Windows, Google has promised to release Mac and Linux versions in the near future.

Chrome is actually based on the same browsing engine that powers Safari, an open source project called WebKit. WebKit isn't a complete browser; it’s a rendering engine used by popular browser applications, including Safari, KHTML, and now Chrome.

Chrome looks to be an excellent browser, one I may very well use as my default browser in Windows once it exits beta testing. One thing I noticed right off was that Google has tweaked the JavaScript engine used in Chrome to produce incredibly speedy results from web sites that use JavaScript. Google wants fast JavaScript capabilities because it wants Chrome to be the browser for choice for individuals who use Google-based services, which use a lot of JavaScript.

Handling JavaScript-heavy web sites is one area where Safari could use a good tuneup. So I decided to test Safari against Chrome on Google's JavaScript test site. This site only tests how quickly a browser can run Google's JavaScript tests; it's not indicative of how fast a browser actually performs. Still, it was an interesting comparison. The JavaScript test site uses five tests to check various types of JavaScript performance.

Here are the results of my test of Safari 3.1.2 and Chrome, on a 3 GHz Mac Pro.

• Overall score: 231/9720
• Richards: 133/7033
• DeltaBlue: 190/8844
• Crypto: 203/8212
• RayTrace: 295/13377
• EarleyBoyer: 439/12698

As you can see, Chrome, which is heavily optimized for JavaScript, left Safari in the dust, at least when it comes to running JavaScript. Most banking sites and many online services, such as web-based email and other web-based applications, use JavaScript.

All I can say is I hope Apple decides to give Safari a JavaScript tuneup in the near future.

Read what Marziah Karch, the About.com Guide to Google, and Scott Orgero, the About.com Guide to Web Browsers, have to say about Chrome.