Microsoft clearly learned from the Seinfeld ad fiasco, because the company in early 2009 followed that campaign with what may have been its most effective series of ads -- the . The ads portrayed attractive, personable young people searching for laptops and buying Windows-based machines because they found them to be more powerful and less expensive than Macs.

The ads hit Apple where it hurt, on price, at a time when the economy was tanking. The image-measuring firm BrandIndex found that of value perception among 18-to-34-year-olds from zero to 46.2 in a few months, while Apple's plummeted from 70 to 12.4 in the same time period. (The highest possible value was 100.)

Windows 1.0's release registered as barely a blip on the computing world's radar. Begun in 1981 and initially dubbed "Interface Manager," Microsoft's first graphical operating system was announced in 1983 but not released until 1985. It didn't run as a stand-alone operating system; instead, users had to launch it from within DOS. And by the time it was released, its thunder was stolen by Apple's Macintosh computer and graphical Mac operating system, which .