ONE of our readers has contributed the following thoughts that more or less agree with what we've been showing for over a year (since Vista 7 was first publicly introduced to bribed friends of Microsoft with access to the press).

I still look for Vista failure news and now see it as a test of journalistic integrity and market share. Vista dominated Windows tech news for a long time. You would think the authors that praised it for a year or two would still write about it if they meant what they said or actually used the software themselves. Reality shows otherwise and this is a failure of its own. Three years after launch Vista has vanished.

As Boycott Novell noticed, Vista has disappeared from the news. Google News searches are more likely to turn up news from towns named Vista as they are to turn up news about the failed OS. If journalists and market share numbers were honest, you would expect to see somewhere between two to fifteen times as much news about Vista as you do about Linux. Instead, a news search for "Linux" turns up 22,900 items and one for "microsoft vista" turns up only 8,400, only 500 if you include the quotes. In fact, you will find more news about XP than Vista.

What does this mean? Is there really no independent press that cares about Microsoft software? Are there really four times as many GNU/Linux users as there are Vista users? Is all news about Microsoft Windows advertising in disguise? "Windows 7" pulls in 34,000 results and "Windows XP" finds 9,000. The disparity between use and reporting is interesting to say the least.

The results are not a fluke of search terms or Google bias. A search for "Windows Vista" finds 8,500 and the first page is nearly identical for a search on "Microsoft Vista". Google knows what I'm looking for. Bing News presents exactly 100 results for any search term, so it can't be used for comparison. The Microsoft damaged Yahoo News search finds about 2,000 results for "microsoft vista", 2,600 for "windows xp", 3,000 for "windows vista", 4,100 for "linux" and "windows 7" pulls a whopping 13,300. I expect ratios between Google and Yahoo elsewhere.

see news.google.com news.search.yahoo.com and push the "news" tab on any Bing query to find 100 hand picked articles about anything you would like Microsoft guidance about.

In other news, I thought BN readers would enjoy this article by a stock analyst who thinks people don't care about Windows and Microsoft is too stupid to learn how to sell it.

"The marketing effort for Windows 7 now underway clearly illustrates one thing: Microsoft has not learned from the past. For some reason, they seem to think that people actually care about the features of their operating system. The truth is, people don't really care. ... Windows 7 is likely to follow the same fate as Vista."

"the upgrade cycle bonanza came to an end when... the PC became good enough! At that point, upgrades went from being no-brainer decisions to true nightmares. The major issues faced by users today are not speed or capacity -- it is simplicity and inter-operability. The most common problems faced by PC users occur when what used to work just fine now no longer works. The most common problem faced by PC users today is making sure that a new piece of software recently installed does not disrupt everything else that already works."

All very obvious. The broken software issue is old, Comes vs Microsoft email shows that Microsoft was aware of the issue almost 10 years ago. He's also a little confused if he thinks that Windows 7 is much of an improvement over Vista but his arguments for Windows 7 failure do not depend on that because he knows that Microsoft's market is still using XP and Vista is irrelevant. What's interesting is seeing this kind of reasoning in print.