As reports trickle in that opening-day sales for Microsoft's Vista (the software giant's new $6 billion operating system) have been tepid at best, now may be an appropriate time for the company to revamp its $500 million marketing strategy—namely, having Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates stump for the product on every media outlet that will have him. The bespectacled ubermogul has been nebbishy at best—and downright bumbling at worst—in his attempts to sell the virtues of Vista to the general public.

In his appearance on The Daily Show Monday, Gates's forced chuckles at host Jon Stewart's one-liners were the least of his worries (see video, here). Rather than steer conversation towards the product at hand, Gates waxed at length about a TV/computing future that sounds suspiciously like, uh, TiVo. (Sayeth Gates: "Say you're watching the news—you can spend more time on the topics you're interested in and little or no time on the things you don't care about."). Worse yet was his awkward exeunt from the guest's chair. He stood up as Stewart was shaking his hand and, as the camera panned out, proceeded to walk off the set. As a confused Stewart intoned, "He's leaving! He can't just leave!" Gates kept walking.

He didn't fare better on CNN's American Morning yesterday. When, after toggling through a few Vista features, host Miles O'Brian said the new interface looked pretty much like Mac's dated OSX platform (diss!), a visibly uncomfortable Gates responded:

"No, no, no. Actually, uh, the, we're ahead [slight pause] on a lot, uh, there's whole areas where we've innovated like Media Center and tablet, uh, that, uh, no one else is doing and the parental control, that's the first time that's been done."

The coup de grâce, however, came on NPR's "Day to Day" (listen here), when host Alex Chadwick noted, "There is some sense that Mac is cool and Windows is not." After playing one of the ubiquitous "I'm a Mac" spots on the air, Chadwick asked Gates if he thought it was "a little bit mean."

"Certainly not to me," Gates shot back while nervously laughing.

At least he didn't bring up the "parental controls."

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