I saw it during the US Open this weekend. The commercial had a young boy sitting in a chair in an all white room. All sorts of various experts and famous people were teaching the boy about every topic. The thing dragged on for like 60 or 90 seconds. You just knew it was going to be one of those stupid commercials where the product has nothing to do with the ad. Finally the commercial ended with "What is the boy's name?"

Linux

My description doesn't do justice to how dumb the commercial was. It is worse then the MS commercials that show people dancing in the park and somehow tries to make the connection that they are so happy because they use MS software.

I think advertising agencies have a catalog of generic commercials and they slap the name of their newest client at the end.

-Dylan

slashdot article about the ad:
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=03/09/04/1821217

I just watched it (MPG version here) and I have to totally disagree.

You apparently didn't listen to what the (unseen) observers were saying -- that everything the boy learned we all learned. It may have been more clear, and it may not have been the best advertisement, but it was interestingly filmed and had a clear message, just in a more cinematic sense than most. In fact, that may add to the commercial, as it doesn't treat the viewer as an idiot; it treats the user as if he has the knowledge to understand without being beaten over the head, and that may be the audience they're targeting.

Honestly, I thought it was a great treatment of a cool science fiction short film. Of course, that doesn't necessarily negate the idea that it was a dumb commercial.

I just saw the commercial. I'd have to say I thought it was ok. Not nearly as creative and smart as IBM's other commercials they've run recently, though. I am really surprised they got Muhammad Ali to appear in it. That alone made me like the commercial more.

- trs

Then I guess I'm an idiot because I still don't see how the commercial has any relation to Linux.

-Dylan

The point is that Linux (from the perspective of the ad) is all about community -- that knowledge is easily shared. Whenever someone solves a problem with Linux, the entire community benefits, not just that one user, because the knowledge of that user is disseminated to the entire community. Not just in BBS postings and whatnot, but the fact that a problem solved in an open source application is immediately put back into the main distribution so that everyone can benefit. This is different than Windows usually is on both those counts.

Note that the boy in the commercial is just an anthropomorphization of Linux and/or the Linux community -- he doesn't do anything himself; he's not really human. He exists solely to collect knowledge and distribute it.

Now I get it reading ./. I totally missed the message.

-Dylan