I saw this Microsoft ad on television the other day (read: several weeks ago) and thought it was pretty good:

What's interesting is after it came out I heard people whining that the ad was not as funny as the Mac ads or Jerry did not do a good job delivering some of the punch lines or that it was not received well by the general public or what have you. Well hey, I think ANYTHING Microsoft does to make fun of itself or just show that it has a creative side has got to be good. It's too easy to poke fun at the 300 lb gorilla and be all indie and cool a rebel but at least this add created some buzz for Microsoft and I bet that is all it was supposed to do.

So, then along comes the revised, specifically aimed at Apple response to the "I'm a Mac" ads:

To me this IS bad. This kind of reactionary response to another company or their ad campaign isn't the best way to go. It just confirms that Apple won that round and that Microsoft is feeling the heat. Better to do something else entirely and fail than to be perceived as needing damage control.

Ben Hardwidge from Custom PC said it well.

"Of course, the whole 'I'm a Mac and I'm a PC' thing is pretty irrelevant anyway, when you consider that Macs are now based on the same Intel hardware as many PCs. We're really talking about operating systems rather than computer standards here and, let's face it, Microsoft isn't being particularly original by parodying the ads of its competitors."

Why does it seem that Microsoft can only hire lame ad agencies...? The best thing they could do would be to make us laugh out loud by making fun of themselves. All of these celebrities in this ad smack of desperation, "Hey, we really are credible and popular, please like us!"

Duh... no one doubts that they are popular but you need to have something original to say or it's just, well, not very original.