"The Developer" at MDC 2003: Borderline tasteless

Maybe I don't realize just how tolerant TV viewers are of tacky reality TV shows, but I found this morning's mock-reality-TV show video from Microsoft, "The Developer," presented at this morning's MDC 2003 keynote, to be borderline tasteless. The premise is that a hunky blonde mobile application developer guy gets to choose from four women dressed up in large cartoony mobile device costumes -- obviously patterned after Nokia, Palm, Pocket PC and SmartPhone. Each of the women is desperate to be chosen and of course the two based on Windows devices are the winners. At the end, the Nokia-woman and Palm-woman are leaving via limo; Nokia-woman is crying but Palm-woman pulls out her own "little black book," then starts crying when she realizes she includes no phone to call another would-be suitor. Even worse, developer-guy ends up with two women! Oh well, maybe Microsoft subscribes to the "even bad publicity is better than none" school of PR. Certainly the whole thing was pitched for laughs, but I'm not sure all the women present were laughing, amongst this (as-usual) overwhelmingly male crowd. If you ask me, the gag would have been far funnier if the developer had been a woman and the phone-objects men.