Forget Seinfeld, Microsoft, you want the two Coreys

Here at Crave, we occasionally like to crowd-source our humor.

Thursday, we learned that Jerry Seinfeld, one of the funniest men on the planet, will be the new spokesman in an ad campaign for Microsoft's Vista operating system. Can Seinfeld steal some of the marketing thunder from Apple's hipster Macintosh dude and the poor, shlubby Windows fella who clearly needs to get his suit tailored?

Well, as our readers have noted, there's a bit of irony to this, since many of us recall that Seinfeld was always using a Mac on his '90s sitcom. That got us thinking: Should Microsoft hire someone not so clearly playing both sides of the fence? Thankfully, our readers had some terrific ideas.

• Our first commenter, "J-Hawaii," had a good suggestion, a Borg drone from Star Trek: The Next Generation. However, I'm not sure this is the best representative of Microsoft's business-first attitude. While we often think of the Borg as joyless automatons of a conformist culture, the best-known Borg, Seven of Nine in Star Trek: Voyager, added new femininity to cyber-kinetic life forms. Even the creepy Borg Queen in the movie Star Trek: First Contact had a certain je ne sais quoi about her.

Could a Borg offer the first sex appeal to a Microsoft ad campaign since the Rolling Stones were singing Start Me Up for Windows 95?

• Commentator "Dirk VanNerden," along with many others, suggests Steve Carell and the rest of the cast of The Office. Makes sense; you've got vaguely unhappy office folk stuck in workplace purgatory in Scranton, Penn. (I grew up about 20 miles from Scranton, so trust me: "purgatory" is a nice way to put it.) Total Microsoft stereotype. Nails it.

However, a Microsoft fan might point out that the cast of a Carell movie, The 40-Year-Old Virgin could work just as well for Apple. You know, gadget heads stuck forever in some sort of adolescent, video-game-playing, pot-smoking purgatory.

Here at Crave, we also like to be platform neutral with our insults.

• Homer Simpson, Charlie Brown, Rodney Dangerfield, Jason Alexander (who played hapless "George" on Seinfeld), and other people doomed to never get it right (unless they do the opposite of what they'd normally do, like George did): Personally, I think the diabolical, nuclear-plant-owning "Mr. Burns" on The Simpsons might be a better stand-in for a company that throws out a profit of a few billion dollars every quarter, despite the Vista follies. But, hey, that's just me.

• "Cafteach" suggests the great comedian and San Franciscan Robin Williams. Makes a lot of sense: Like Microsoft, Mork was at the height of his powers in the '90s, winning an Oscar for his performance in Good Will Hunting. And like Microsoft, he's laid some eggs in recent years. Did anyone even see RV? That said, he was still awfully funny as a penguin's voice in Happy Feet (or was that a puffin?)

• "Theoscnet" offers the cruelest cut of all: The two Coreys, "Corey Feldman and Corey Whoever..." It's Corey Haim, Theo. I looked it up for you. It's been a long time since we got the double-Corey treatment in '80s classics such as License to Drive and The Lost Boys. (But wasn't Keifer Sutherland really scary as a Jim Morrison-inspired vampire?)

The last we saw the two Coreys, they were puffy 30-somethings starring in The Two Coreys--"a look at the lives of former child stars Corey Feldman and Corey Haim living together as adults," as The Internet Movie Database puts it.

Microsoft...a metaphor for washed-up child stars? No way, but it's fair to say the company is starting to look a little puffy and out of fashion in its middle age, as our readers are quick to point out.