You know Microsoft is hopelessly out of touch when the opening paragraph of the Wall Street Journal article that's supposed to be touting the tech giant's marketing coup starts off something like this: "Microsoft Corp., weary of being cast as a stodgy oldster by Apple Inc.'s advertising, is turning for help to Jerry Seinfeld." Huh? Microsoft is hoping to appeal to the Gen Y demo—people in their 20s—by hiring a spokesman who is 54? Better yet: Seinfeld will be appearing in the commercials alongside Bill Gates himself, who doesn't exactly conjure up an image of cool with iPod-listening, Macbook-carrying hipsters on the L train. The $300 million campaign, which will debut on Sept. 4th, will be promoting Microsoft's Vista operating system, which, company officials acknowledge, has generated a "negative public perception." (That's probably because it sucks.) Why did Seinfeld decide to participate? We're guessing it may have had something to do with the $10 million paycheck.

Mark Penn, the CEO of Burson-Marsteller, will likely never work in politics again. He's in hot water over his advice to Hillary Clinton. A series of memos obtained by The Atlantic show Penn offering Clinton unsavory advice. (For example: highlighting Barack Obama's childhood abroad as a way of suggesting he was too foreign to be president.) But the fallen flack has a promising career as consigliere to tech CEOs, based on his advice to Bill Gates: "Being human is overrated."

Bill Gates: Doesn't even love his mother These days, Microsoft chairman Bill Gates is known as the most charitable person in the entire world, giving away billions of dollars through the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. But for years, Gates was known first for his money and second for a mean streak that flared particularly with women, starting with his mom. In an article bidding farewell to the now-retired top executive at Microsoft, Wired ran down the highlights:

Here's to the screaming ones. The chair-throwers. The death-threat makers. The imperious gazers. The ones who see things differently — and will stare you down until you do, too. They're not fond of rules, especially those outlined by the human-resources department on "treating your employees with respect." And they have no respect for conversational decibel levels. You can cower before them, hide from them, quote them behind their backs, or vilify them. About the only thing you can't do is ignore them. Because they're so damn loud. They've worked at Google. Apple. Microsoft. AOL. They've ruled the industry — or they've failed, loudly. Below, we present you tech's 10 most tempestuous bosses — the ones who scream different. While some see them as sociopaths, Valleywag sees genius.

A grisly beheading on a Greyhound bus bound for Winnipeg, Manitoba may well have been committed by an immigrant admitted under a skilled-worker program in 2001. While riding the bus, a reportedly unprovoked Vince Weiguang Li stabbed carnie Tim McLean twelve times, beheaded him, and began eating parts of the corpse. A laptop which Li sold to teenager Darren Beatty had a letter which said "he felt guilty for leaving China, and that everything in Canada was not as he expected," according to a Google translation. Why are we subjecting you, dear reader, to this gory tale?Because this is the same skilled-worker immigration program that Microsoft chairman Bill Gates praised at the 50th anniversary hearing of Congress's science and technology committee:

Trash hauler Republic Services was set to be acquired by Allied Waste Industries in a stock transaction worth $6.2 billion. But then Waste Management Inc. stepped in, matching the $6.2 billion offer but in cash. Turns out that through Cascade Investment, former Microsoft CEO Bill Gates owns a stake in both Republic and WMI — pitting Gates in a bitter hostile takeover bid against Gates. [Earth2Tech]

The Economist tidily sums up billg's career this week, now that Microsoft's Rain Man (see video) has walked away from the company after 33 years. I've whittled the piece down to its talking points.

Microsoft's Vista apologists no longer have to worry about former chief software architect Bill Gates letting slip an admission that its latest operating system sucks, sending computer makers and users back to Windows XP. As soon as Dell, HP and other major manufacturers sell their current-supply of XP-loaded PCs, no more will come off the shelves as Microsoft ends production of the aging but quite functional operating system today. But instead of moving on to Windows Vista, large corporate clients like General Motors intend to purchase Vista-loaded computers and "downgrade" them to XP. Meanwhile, only 8 percent of all software developers are working on applications for Vista, while 49 percent continue to develop for XP.

Microsoft co-founder, former CEO and executive chairman Bill Gates should be just about wrapping up his last day as a full-time employee of Microsoft and moving on to head up the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. While I never met the man, he certainly loomed large in my life growing up in Seattle and beyond. While the classic "Tiger Beat" style photo here tried valiantly to make Gates appear a little sexy for the publicity machine surrounding the launch of the original Windows operating system, it failed where Gates succeeded. While Gates was a ruthlessly competitive capitalist who used and abused Microsoft's monopoly position to maim and sometimes kill the competition, he did make being a computer nerd something to aspire to, if not exactly cool.

The Bill Gates media express rolls on as Gates powers down his infernally unusable computer at Redmond today, but he's leaving as a prophet. In an interview with Tom Brokaw, he notes that any Yahoo deal (which he was never enthusiastic about in the first place) probably won't happen. [CNBC]

• InBev may need to raise its offer for Anheuser-Busch by $7 billion to win over the company's board. [Bloomberg]

Five years ago, which is probably about when Microsoft started announcing shipping dates for Vista, Bill Gates wanted to play with Windows Movie Maker. Thanks to the power of Windows XP and Microsoft's online support, it took him over an hour in frustration downloading software, installing it and rebooting and, in the end, still without the software he was looking for.

Putting media naysayers in their place, Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates continued his farewell tour by pointing to old press accounts of companies like Ashton Tate and Lotus as worthy competitors into the perspective only the ultimate winner can enjoy. When asked by CNET's Ina Fried about the early presumptions that IBM would eat Microsoft's lunch and how that turned out, Gates used the opportunity to challenge those who would similarly presume that Google will eventually destroy Team Redmond.

As co-founder and former CEO Bill Gates prepares to soft-retire from Microsoft, he indulged in a feel-good photo op with his former business partner Paul Allen and the remaining staff from Microsoft's startup days when the company was based in Albuquerque, New Mexico. The team's fashion sense rather explicitly demonstrates the transition from innovative upstarts to staid conservatives over the last thirty years. [Newsweek]

Bill Gates, the nerdy and controversial co-founder of virus-y software monolith Microsoft is handing over the reins of his monster corporation. His last official workday will be June 27th. "Three people will essentially fill the void left behind when Bill Gates retires from the company he and friend Paul Allen co-founded in 1975. Since Gate's began his transition from leading Microsoft to heading his personally-bankrolled charity, The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, his job as chief software architect has been handled by Ray Ozzie. Craig Mundie inherited Gate's chief research and strategy officer duties, while former Harvard classmate Steve Ballmer became chief executive officer at the Seattle-based software colossus." But will become of poor wittle Microsoft when daddy leaves?

While a young student at Seattle's snootiest private prep school, Lakeside, dweebish Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates was asked to write the computer program that arranged students' class schedules. Having just absorbed the student bodies from a private girl's school, Gates gamed the system to make sure all his classes had nothing but the hotties, even though males outnumbered females 3-1. He may not be the sexiest CEO out there, but points for trying.

The Google Street View car was Spotted in Microsoft Country last week after launching in many smaller markets around the country first. Apparently the drivers, rather than use some fancy, newfangled Internet doohickey, simply burn the data captured by the rooftop camera array onto a CD and mail it back to Mountain View. The fact that Portland, Oregon and Juneau, Alaska were added to the list of Street View cities before Seattle inspired an April Fools article in local publication Naked Loon quoting a fictional Google spokesmonkey as saying the addition of Seattle was "extremely unlikely, save for some kind of highly localized disaster centered somewhere in Redmond."

After meeting at Harvard, Microsoft chairman Bill Gates and CEO Steve Ballmer have been working together for so long, "they often complete each other's sentences," according to sources cited by the Wall Street Journal in a frontpage feature for Gates's last month working full-time at the Redmond software giant. But it wasn't all smiles and sunshine over the years. After handing over the title of CEO to Ballmer, "In meetings Mr. Gates would interject with sarcasm, undermining Mr. Ballmer in front of other executives." And at one point, Gates even pitched a fit!

Cascade Investment LLC, the fund managed by Microsoft chairman Bill Gates, has made good on its November promise to exit from its investment in Pacific Ethanol. What's surprising? He's doing it at a loss, converting his preferred shares to common shares worth $8 apiece and selling them for less than $4 apiece. With 1.4 million shares sold in three days, that's a loss of over $5 million. Pocket change for Gates, certainly, but in almost halving his original 20 percent stake it's a strong vote of no confidence in the ethanol business. While Accel Partners Joe Schoendorf has said that "a good way to lose money is to bet against Vinod [Khosla]" who's been bullish on ethanol, I'm going to side with Gates on this one.

Speaking at Microsoft's TechEd conference in Orlando, Florida, Bill Gates said some stuff about Internet Explorer 8, blah blah blah. More importantly, he rolled out the latest version of Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer, a Windows-powered machine that waves its arms and shouts "Developers, developers, developers!" It can even throw eggs in order to fend off ruthless Hungarians when necessary. Presumably it can also throw chairs to fend off larger predators like Google. However, any attempts to buy Yahoo inevitably result in a blue screen of death. We hear Steve Ballmer 2.0's first decision was to hire Lloyd Braun.