Like many colleagues, I get a kick out of the Apple versus Microsoft television commercial wars. Apple’s ads are funny at Microsoft’s expense, appeal to a youthful generation, and are simple to understand. Microsoft recently gave Jerry Seinfeld an estimated 10 million for two commercial spots with Bill Gates and then pulled them. I’m not sure what the point was with the Seinfeld ads, to make Bill seem like a regular guy maybe? On that and some many other levels, it failed. Now Microsoft seems to want to take a defensive posture in their ads and emphasize that many diverse people are Microsoft users and don’t fit the stereotype created by Apple. I’m not sure that spot is going to make it either; everyone who claims, “I’m a PC” looks mad! It seems to me that you would generally not want to portray the emotional state of the user of your product as angry, but what do I know?

What I do know is this seems to me to be another “0 to 60 in 1.6 Giga-seconds” moment (in other words, a kind of techie dj vu). If you’re old enough, you remember the impact of the Apple 1984 Super Bowl commercial that announced the first generation Mac. The ad ran during the day only once (Super Bowl Sunday) and was the talk of the water-cooler for months thereafter. While not specifically mentioned, IBM was Apple’s target nemesis in the segment, the “Big Brother” in George Orwell’s novel, Nineteen Eighty-Four.

Interestingly enough, a TNT movie made in 1999, “Pirates of Silicon Valley” portrays the moment when Steve Jobs unveils the 1984 commercial to his employees internally as the point in time that Steve realizes his enemy was not IBM, but was actually Microsoft (start the video at about the 4:30 mark).

I’m not sure of the historical authenticity of that particular meeting and that moment and I’m sure the movie took a lot of creative license. But it is clear that at point in time, Apple spent a lot of money to run a very creative ad against IBM, who didn’t turn out to be the biggest threat.

So fast-forward to today. Is there a correlation? Apple seems to be winning the ad war with Microsoft, at least in terms of creativity. But has Apple targeted the right enemy? Who else could benefit from Apple and Microsoft pouring money into advertising? Both companies have a lot of resources and smart people, but their resources are walled-in and their abilities are therefore limited as a result.

In the meantime, open source communities continue to grow and prosper without boundaries. Cloud computing providers are providing more and more software-as-a-service in a manner that cares not if you are running a PC or a Mac … or even an Ubuntu for that matter. As Nick Carr suggests, the World Wide Web is turning into the World Wide Computer. If and when that happens, operating systems become irrelevant, don’t they?