I think the marketing team needs to connect with real people. They are trying something different than the norm with these ads, but in my opinion, they failed. I doubt the ads have any effect on Microsoft's or Vista's image to the average person.
Gates and Seinfeld are both past their prime, so I don't know why they are the stars. It seems to reinforce the picture of PCs being for middle-aged people and businesses. Microsoft already dominates those areas; it's college students that they are losing. The mac ads successfully appeal to the college-age demographic, and that is what Microsoft needs to do to compete. Of course, they can't just copy the Get a Mac ads since they would get criticized for that, but they need to do something that shows PCs (or computers running Vista, more specifically) are cool and do stuff college students want.
Maybe Microsoft is targeting people who aren't buying Vista because they have heard bad things about it (like they did with the "Mojave experiment"). In that case, I think a traditional ad campaign would work. If you just tell people that Vista works and that it is something that they should get (because it will help them somehow), inevitable a lot of people will believe you and go out and buy Vista.
Though Microsoft could do better, I'm almost glad to see that they are not, since we need more competition against Windows. It's great to see Apple gaining so much market share, and Ubuntu isn't doing too badly either (I just wish there was more commercial software out there for Linux, instead of having to rely on free software that never really works as well**, but companies seem to ignore Linux since the user base is so small and somewhat hostile to commercial software).
**For example, I could spend many hours or days trying to set up MythTV on Linux and still have it never work quite right, or I could buy EyeTV for Mac and have it work out of the box with almost no effort. Or I could spend hours trying to get a decent graphics driver to work on Linux, but on Windows I can just download and install it like any program and (probably) have it work the first time without having to edit any configuration files.
