As part of its strategy to counter the negative perception of Windows Vista and the Apple Inc.’s aggressive and successful marketing, Microsoft hired world-wide known comedian Jerry Seinfeld as its image.

The famous comedian best-known for his very successful eponymous sitcom will get as much as $10 million for his part of work to anchor Microsoft’s $300 million dollar advertising campaign, the Wall Street Journal reported. The comedian will reportedly appear in ads with Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates. The paper report also mentioned that Microsoft plans to use the images of other comedians such as Will Ferrell and Chris Rock.

The advertising campaign was created by the Miami-based agency Crispin, Porter + Bogusky and will launch on September 4th. The campaign ads will probably use some variations of the slogan "Windows, Not Walls."

Microsoft is in a desperate need to counter Apple’s ads that put Windows Vista in a bad spotlight. For example, one of those ads represents Vista as a clumsy, middle-manager type while Apple's Leopard OS is personified as a cool hipster.

According to a recent study, at least 35 percent of the PCs produced to run the Windows Vista have been downgraded to XP. Also very few businesses upgraded their XP to Vista arguing that it’s expensive and the change might cause them compatibility problems with older software. Microsoft execs believe this occurred also because of the popular culture fueled by Apple’s ads which focused on sending the message that Vista is a hard-to-use operating system.

Nevertheless, Microsoft’s reign of the computer operating system market is slowly declining as other viable alternatives are emerging. Besides Apple’s Leopard, the open source Linux OS is gaining more and more ground especially as Ubuntu and other distributors are adding features to make the operating system easier to use. Retail behemoth Wal-Mart is selling gPC, an operating system made by Everex and based on Linux, for about $200 since early 2008. Apple managed to increases its Macs sales with 41 percent this year compared to 2007 and the list of facts that are slowly but surely trimming Microsoft’s market share goes on and on.

Crispin Porter + Bogusky, an advertising agency that currently employs around 700 people, has become famous with ads such as Burger King’s Subservient Chicken, Miller Lite Man Laws and BMW Mini. CP+B has been working to promote the Microsoft brand since February. The software producer’s decision to hire Jerry Seinfeld to anchor their advertising campaign was probably take in order to avoid an image that gets too close to the fickle youth market that CP+B usually targets.

However, a safe approach may not be the best solution in this case. At some point, Microsoft will probably have no other alternative but to fight fire with fire and bite the Apple and its Mac vs. PC ads.

"They are not seen as cool. Apple is cool. Can anyone even recall a Microsoft ad? No." said Robert Passikoff, president of NY branding firm Brand Keys, according to the Wall Street Journal. And he is so right…