"Well the initial impression is how much it [Windows 7] looks like Vista. Which I think is…uh…the thing I’m not supposed to say."

--Microsoft Jack Schofield

Summary: Vendors begin to speak out about the effect (or lack thereof) of Vista 7 being released

THIS is the latest lesson in the reality behind Vista 7. It is not getting any better.

In the past week there have been zero headlines about Vista, at least in Google News. We wrote about this trend last week too. By contrast, Google News had 22 clusters of items with Vista 7 ("Windows 7") in the headline. It is obvious that Microsoft is trying to bury Vista because of its name. Microsoft would rather pretend that the two operating systems are totally different, just like in the Mojave Experiment (an experiment in marketing).

“Microsoft would rather pretend that the two operating systems are totally different, just like in the Mojave Experiment (an experiment in marketing).”Last week we wrote about a parents group complaining about Microsoft's Vista 7 ads in 'Family Guy'. It turns out the those ads have been aired despite being "axed". Did they pull a fast one? Or was it all just posted online? Either way, Gizmodo's headline sums it up like this: "The Killed Windows 7 Family Guy Special Even More Horrible Than I Imagined"

It is really just like Vista. It becomes obvious when they get started with some superficial propaganda and superstars to make huge hype (worth hundreds of millions of dollars, allocated to marketing of one product alone). For Vista it was Seinfeld, Jackass, NASCAR, and Bollywood, to name a few examples. Microsoft recruited these to promote Windows Vista. For Vista 7, Microsoft is now tapping Sugababes. How corny.

Interpublic agency UM is behind a campaign to encourage listeners of ballad-heavy UK radio station Heart to visit a website dubbed "Sugababes love Windows 7" to suggest locations for the girl band to perform in.

From the Telegraph: "Microsoft marketing thinks that women = Sugababes"

Aiming for that crucial eight-year-old girls market, Microsoft’s abysmal marketing department have signed up the Sugababes as the new face of Windows 7. Follow the three unrecognisable singer-dancer-actress-models in a series of painfully stilted videos as they use the new, fast, easy to use operating system to organise their busy lives. As though they don’t have a retinue of PAs and record company stooges, for God’s sake.

Microsoft does not resort to such a pathetic strategy until the products fail to sell. It was exactly the same with Vista, as Microsoft got slammed for using celebrities only after it had failed to make healthy business (as measured in terms of "sales", where the definition varies).

As we stated before, increase in Acer sales was hardly noticeable after the initial launch hype (exactly the same as Vista because avid fans are the first/only ones to buy it off the shelves). Here is a new report which contains some numbers now that Acer speaks publicly about it.

Windows 7 is a small impulse to pc sales

Gianfranco Lanci, chief of Acer, said into an interview that Windows 7 had a noticeable but small influence in hardware sales. People bought pcs more because of the natural cycle to replace or upgrade old hardware, and not to have a prepared computer to run Windows 7 properly.

Also Dell noticed a lift to its own sales but hasn’t said whether it has planned for a more sustained boost. For now corporate buyers, the business sector are skeptical when we talk about windows 7 and they still wait to a mature product, they still want to see how Windows 7 behaves on different hardware, and more important if Windows 7 will involve also and upgrade at hardware level to be compatible with new OS. In this economic environment, with lower budget, other costs would not be a good thing. Business sector learned the lesson from Vista, the biggest failure of Microsoft, when was released, incompatible with available hardware, an OS with huge system requirements, unavailable for big part of existing hardware at that time.

What also ought to be mentioned is a new conflict of interests. What Acer does not say is that it developed some special relationship with Microsoft, under the banner "Genuine Partner Program". From last week's news:

Under its Genuine Partner Program, Microsoft and Acer are enabling partner resellers such as VillMan to showcase Acer PC systems powered by genuine software such as the Windows 7 operating system and Microsoft Office at reasonable prices.

The Microsoft-faithful reporters have attempted to spin Acer's words to produce Windows promotion. This happens for obvious reasons, but not much is said about scale and correlation to time of the season (holiday), as Vista was released well after Christmas, not to mention last year being the midst of an economic drought. This has impact on year-to-year projections.

“The Microsoft-faithful reporters have attempted to spin Acer's words to produce Windows promotion.”All along we were expecting to see some fake numbers about Vista 7 "sales", and quite rightly so. Microsoft has tricks for cooking these books. It is rather pathetic yet deceiving when they are trying to make improper comparisons with one bad version of Windows (usually Vista) being replaced by a newer one (Vista 7, the "Service Pack" of Vista). There are also many headlines comparing it to Apple in the US, with bogus numbers [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7]. It's the art of spin. They only make comparisons that make Vista 7 look like a success while avoiding all others.

According to new statements from Gartner, which is biased in favour of Microsoft, not all is good, to say the very least.

Gartner says Windows 7, Microsoft's new operating system, will have a little impact on holiday PC sales, but noted that 2010 PC shipments could be affected.

And also:

Gartner also forecasts a limited impact on sales of the introduction of Windows 7, the new PC operating system from Microsoft.

That's the same Gartner which lied about Vista, saying in 2007 that "Sooner or later, most organizations will deploy Windows Vista."

Vista 7 is a failure. As this cartoon reminds us, it is just not as bad as Vista. Too many people still pay attention to marketing messages. They never learn. ⬆

"If you can’t make it good, at least make it look good."

--Bill Gates, Microsoft