Valleywag is reporting that the $300 million Microsoft ad campaign featuring Jerry Seinfeld has been canceled as the company seeks other ways to remind consumers that its products, like the characters in the ads, were totally cool in the Nineties, but now, not so much. As one commenter on Valleywag opined: "the Bill Gates ass wiggle still haunts me." Here's the long version of the second ad, which Seattlest saw once on Sunday night during......

Safeco_1999 by Seattlest Flickr Photographer sonoazure. To us, a stadium. To Microsoft, a conference room. Rainier Valley Post warns: beware the Microsofties on I-90 today! The Microsoft annual meeting will be 11 a.m.-2 p.m. at Safeco Field today, and I-90 is sure to be a clusterfuck.Flu season is just around the corner and the B-Town Blog has a comprehensive list of south Sound sites for flu shots.Lights & Sirens reports on the oldest homicide suspect......

For the 15th year in a row, Bill Gates has topped the list of wealthiest Americans. While the rest of us are worrying about our debit cards working at WaMu, the Microsoft founder, valued at $59 billion, can afford to pay Jerry Seinfeld to hang out with him. Warren Buffett, always the bridesmaid and never the bride, came in second again. We're pretty sure being worth $50 billion is consolation enough.......

What do you get when you combine $300 million, Bill Gates and Jerry Seinfeld? Apparently a string of unusual commercials in which Seinfeld plays himself and Gates plays a what we can only hope is a caricature of himself. All set in a mall. (A mall? Couldn't find a Stuckey's or Tower Records to shoot in?) The first of what we can only imagine will be a relentless onslaught of Microsoft commercials featuring Seinfeld......

It is the kind of event for which cliche sayings like "it's the end of an era" were made. Today is Bill Gates' last day as the chairman of Microsoft, the software company he created and made into an all-encompassing empire. While Gates will remain the non-executive chairman of Microsoft, his full-time job will be with the Gates Foundation, he and wife Melinda's international health non-profit. One of his first stops after bowing out of......

When we read that the Seattle Times had a large feature on the top paid CEOs in the Pacific Northwest, we wondered what the point was. Everyone knows Bill Gates, Paul Allen, and Jeff Bezos—all local CEOs—are richer than God. And it turns out everyone, this Seattlest included, is wrong. According to the Times piece, the best paid local CEO in 2007 was James Voelker, who runs Bellevue's InfoSpace—a company we've never heard of.......

Apparently we're not the only ones with hope for Microsoft! Wired Magazine published an interview this morning with Mary Jo Foley, author of the cutely-titled book Microsoft 2.0, about the future of the company as Bill Gates leaves the day-to-day ops in the hands of Steve "I walked away from Yahoo" Ballmer. Her verdict? "It's dangerous for companies of any size to count them out. They're still good at figuring out how to come......

Anyone want to start taking bets on how far Yahoo stocks will drop this morning? Double your winning by guessing the proper amount of time it takes for the descent to begin. After Microsoft withdrew their bid for Yahoo late this weekend, Seattlest is guessing the crash will begin within the first few seconds of trading. Microsoft's withdrawl was spurned by another Yahoo rejection. Despite raising their bid for Yahoo by over $5 million,......

Bill Gates doesn't have to wait for much of anything these days, even when it comes to Homeland Security altering laws based on his recommendations. Gates testified before Congress on March 12th of this year requesting the government to reconsider its stance on the length of time foreign non-immigrant students could remain and work in the US. Less than a month later, on April 4th, the Department of Homeland Security granted his request verbatim.......

Last night at Benaroya Hall, author Richard Powers read from a new short story called "Modulation." It was classic Powers; a dense, far-reaching, and meticulously vivid tale of a computer virus that infects music player devices via filesharing sites. He weaves the story around four different individuals: a Japanese hacker recently released from prison and now employed by the RIAA to huntdown filesharers, a Brazilian journalist researching soldiers in Iraq who blast ear-crunching music from......

We guess Forbes went back to measuring rich folks. It was announced today, courtesy of Forbes' annual billionaires list, that Bill Gates is no longer the richest man in the world. The title now belongs to U.S. financier Warren Buffett, who had a very good year in 2007. He saw his wealth jump from an estimated $52 billion to $62 billion. A $10 billion year in the midst of a recession--wow. Interestingly, Buffett saw......

Forbes Magazine must have gotten tired of making the same "Richest People in the World" list, because the magazine has moved on to ranking the "Nation's Most Sinful Cities." In order to do so, Forbes came up with measurable methods to rank the proclivity for each of the seven deadly sins in America's urban populations. (For example to measure the sin of "wrath" the magazine used murder rates for cities.) Of course, you're curious, just......

Just months after spending $240 million to own a portion of the company, Bill Gates has removed his personal Facebook profile. Gates had supposedly purchased a small portion of the social-networking company because he'd so enjoyed using the website. However, after Gate's investment in the company and his personal profile came to light, the Microsoft founder was inundated with friend requests. The London Sun reported that Gates was receiving up to 8,000 friend requests......

Reliable sources tell us that if you ask Mike Daisey what he does for a living, he replies that he's "a monologist." Daisey may be the only person in America who introduces himself that way. If only those hordes who introduce themselves as "mortgage bankers" or "members of the Bush Administration" were as good at their jobs as Daisey is at his. We saw his Monopoly Saturday night at CHAC--it's smart, funny, and well......

The Rev. Ken Hutcherson, who, in addition to demonstrating the importance of increased protective headgear for linebackers, bully-pulpits Redmond's Antioch Bible Church, announced he's founded the AGN Financial Network, to finance his plan to buy Microsoft his brand of morality. The idea is that Christian investors would buy three shares of Microsoft's stock and donate one to AGN. The P-I reports one small obstacle, i.e., reality:It's unclear what effect, if any, the initiative could have......

Complete with CES laugh track. Kind of funny, but maybe not worth the laughs it gets... Hey, if Bill were staring you in the face while you were watching this you'd laugh too. Worth noting that when Gates calls politicians (even when he calls politicians in a joke video), he calls Democrats. Imagine this: "Hey, Huckabee, it's Bill!"......

There's a film crew all set up and shooting some kind of car/shoot 'em up scene right now at 1st and Stewart. We noticed them from our office perched high above the director's chair and ran down to get some shots of our own. When we asked a woman who looked like part of the crew what they're filming, she rubbed her eyes wearily and said in a thick German accent, "German television." Um, OK.......

LAist was comped front row seats by the Dodgers due to Malingering being struck by a foul ball last week, and she came back with some great photos, and earlier made fun of 4th of July on Venice Beach. But the biggest stories of the week was that the Mayor's Hot Tamale was revealed, and that a Kwik-E-Mart was erected in Burbank. Phillyist was busy doing the Fourth of July up right, exercising their......

It's fantastic that Rev. Hutcherson's pro-discrimination ballot initiative died a sad, lonely death recently. The fortunes of domestic partnerships in our state are on the rise, Democratic Presidential candidates seem to have their gay houses more or less in order and Seattle Pride just wrapped up its second go-round Downtown. Things seem to be looking up, but Seattlest likes to judge which way the wind blows by figuring out where the money goes. The local......

News from a day when Jimmy Carter retreated faster than he has since he was attacked by that rabbit. --Three guesses which local company got this resignation letter. --Startup Yapta.com, set to launch tomorrow, won't let a little smoke damage stop them. --Bill Gates: Nostradamus or Miss Cleo --Art Thiel points out that the Mariners have both the worst hitter and worst pitcher in baseball, and these two are making a combined $20 million dollars.......

Now that the UW finally picked a commencement speaker (they settled on Congressman Norm Dicks after Doug E. Doug cancelled), we've compiled this list of 2007 grad day yakkers at all local colleges (source: The Chronicle of Higher Education). Please let us know if we're wrong or if we left anyone out. Local colleges Bastyr College: Joycelyn Elders, masturbation proponent City University of Seattle: James Donaldson, ex-NBA player Evergreen State College: Maxine Mimms, education expert......

At the Microsoft Strategic Account Summit yesterday morning Bill Gates dropped some future knowledge on the assembled ad men and tech types. A few of those nuggets we found particularly interesting and insightful: Prediction #4: There Will Be No Street Cars in Our Large Cities. All hurry traffic will be below or high above ground when brought within city limits. In most cities it will be confined to broad subways or tunnels, well lighted and......

Okay, it's not like we're going to upgrade to Vista in solidarity, but we did swell with a little hometown pride to read this about Bill Gates in this week's New Yorker: That afternoon, [Wolfowitz] took part in a panel on foreign aid with Bill Gates, whose philanthropic foundation has an endowment of $30.6 billion; William Easterly, an economist at New York University who is a well-known skeptic of development policy; and Ellen Johnson......

Rainier Beach (public school): Black fans. O'Dea (private school): White fans. That's the stereotype. So, tonight, as we bounded across Henderson Street toward our car after Rainier Beach's Metro league semifinals 52-46 win, and a black teenage girl asked "Do you know who won the game?," we smiled. We were about to deliver good news to this Beach partisan, we thought. "Rainier Beach won," we reported. "Awwww, DAMN!" she said, scrunching her face up in......

--Bill Gates is appearing on the Daily Show next week. --Federal Way hopes it has started a "healthy debate" on global warming. Who'd a thought banning An Inconvenient Truth would be the first step towards that. --The Cha Cha is going to be ousted by condos soon, but it will live on in pavement art. --Hendrix will be immortalized in energy drink. --Landlords, get a renter in that unit before someone comes and steals all......

According to this guy's cost analysis, not only is Vista going to screw you, the person who purchased the software, it's also going to doom Microsoft itself and quite possibly the computing universe as we have come to know it. Particularly, he's got issues with the Visa Content Protection specification of which he says in the Executive Executive summary of his paper "The Vista Content Protection specification could very well constitute the longest suicide note......

--KCJ is already down and now the Kitsap Sun looks like it might be in jeopardy. --Seattlest drove down to a Renton parking lot the other day and paid some guy cash for a Nintendo Wii, so we don't need Bill Gates to tell us the platform's a Microsoft killer. --Storm water drainage is a concern in Seattle, particularly lately, and there are good and bad ways of handling it. --It's freezing and there's......

Bill Gates made some interesting comments on Digital Rights Management in front of a group of bloggers today in Seattle. Michael Arrington of TechCrunch and a room full of Mac laptop-wielding leading-blogger types got to chat with Gates on the subject of the approaching Mix Conference in Las Vegas, and one of the questions that was asked concerned the long-term viability of DRM. The Microsoft Zune has gotten a lot of criticism over its implementation......

We've been hoping for weeks to publish what Danny Westneat did today--an open letter to everyone who says Seattle's schools are shitty. You've all made your point that Seattle schools stink. But before we subject ourselves to any more of this Seattle self-flagellation, please first indulge me a little quiz. Among our state's 10 largest cities, where do you suppose Seattle ranks for academic achievement? Westneat then supplies statistics indicating that Seattle schools are......

John Richards from KEXP was there MCing and of course Secret Machines were what we came to Westlake Center at noon on a Monday to see, but neither of those were the highest-priced talent that Microsoft would throw up on stage for their first Zune launch event yesterday. None other than the wizard king of Redmond Bill Gates himself stood before us to extol the wonders of the Microsoft mp3 player and pantomime a......