Summary: Setback for marketing of Vista 7 and more bad news regarding cost, technical issues, and the rapid advancement of GNU/Linux

EARLIER this month we wrote about the outrageous "Family Guy" arrangement, which had Microsoft further corrupt/erode trust in television. Well, they have just called the whole thing off.

One of our readers writes: "I wonder if the Family Guy people made the show as tasteless as they could." He quotes this from The Register: "Windows marketing messages were presumably seamlessly integrated into the schtick, so were jokes about deaf people, the Holocaust, feminine hygiene and incest."

More in Business Insider:

Microsoft Shocked 'Family Guy' Humor Includes Incest, Holocaust Jokes (MSFT)

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Turns out Seth MacFarlane isn't PC enough to be a PC. Microsoft was set to sponsor a prime time special by the "Family Guy" creator as part of its Windows 7 media blitz, but was somehow surprised when the typically MacFarlane-esque fare didn't exactly "fit with the Windows brand."

TechDirt claims that Microsoft still benefits from the publicity stunt, whereas Family Guy cannot be trusted anymore due to the fact that it sold out so easily. Like with Seinfeld, this show's reputation is already ruined, stained by the Vista* series.

The Microsoft crowd tried to make Microsoft look like a dominant party in this relationship. "Always blame someone else" is still the motto. There is also a parody about it, courtesy of our reader David Gerard.

Yesterday we showed that in many ways, Vista 7 turns out to be more and more like Vista. Even Family Guy and Seinfeld are a parallel because both were prematurely called off. They turned out to be tasteless marketing for tasteless products. As one blogger has correctly put it:

It is remarkable that a lot of the geek pundits proclaiming the qualities of Windows7 were the same people who once announced that Vista was the cat's meow.

From IDG we are now learning that the cost of Vista 7 (for a business) can almost exceed $2000 per seat.

After last week's saturation coverage of Windows 7, I will spare you the laundry list of changes and new features (check out our Windows 7 Deep Dive Report for that). But I ask you to imagine the hypothetical CFO of that hypothetical 2,500-user organization, staring at an upgrade cost of between $2,587,500 and $4,825,000. Glaring at that number, looking at it sideways, maybe turning it upside down. And this buys us ... what, exactly?

Cringely agrees that "Windows 7 costs so much," to quote his latest headline. Here is a new Vista 7 cartoon which promotes GNU/Linux and here is a new guest post from former Microsoft employee, Keith Curtis. His headline is: "Linux is the future, even after Windows 7 release"

Many of the benefits of Linux are subtle. It doesn't come with any nagware. The default media player supports both many formats including QuickTime and Windows media. Likewise, the instant messaging program supports 16 different protocols. The GUI is more customizable. But the best feature of Linux is something that neither Windows nor the Macintosh have: a rich set of free applications, installable with one click...

More problems with Vista 7 are beginning to surface. From IDG: "Windows 7 endless reboot answer evades Microsoft"

Users remained stymied today by endless reboots after trying to upgrade their PCs to Windows 7, according to messages posted on Microsoft's support forum.

An answer has yet to be found for all users, who began reporting the problem last Friday after watching the upgrade stall two-thirds of the way through the process. Most users said that their PCs had displayed an error that claimed the upgrade had been unsuccessful and that Vista would be restored. Instead, their PCs again booted to the Windows 7 setup process, failed, then restarted the vicious cycle.

Rex Ballard, an IBM employee, writes: "That ought to convince CEOs and CTOs that Windows 7 is the "right choice" for an immediate upgrade.

"I also noticed an official message from IBM telling employees to switch to Firefox as their "official" browser.

"No upgrades to IE 7 allowed."

And another new article compares Vista 7 to GNU/Linux. To quote just a portion:

Just be aware though that you can't upgrade from 32-bit version of Vista to a 64-bit edition of Windows 7. A lot of people found out the hard way that you can't get there from here.

From the comments: "What persuaded me to move permanently to Linux Mint (with XP running in VirtualBox for Adobe apps) is that Windows had become such a Fat Pig. Mint happily runs itself with several applications open (Thunderbird, OpenOffice Writer), and WinXP Pro running MS Word XP under VirtualBox, on my ThinkPad T43 with 2 GB of RAM. And by "happily," I mean "no perceptible slowdown in any of the Linux or Windows apps. That, to me, is nifty, remarkable, convenient, and cool."

As we stressed before, Vista 7's launch went terribly wrong and it's only the beginning. Recall the early warnings (video below), namely messages which got ignored and their messengers viciously attacked and ridiculed. Perception management in action [1, 2]. ⬆