"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: More new parallels found which show the similarity between Vista marketing and Vista 7 marketing

THE reality behind Vista 7 continues to fascinate. It is like a proper duplication of the disaster known as "Vista".

A lot of people may not remember this, but back in 2007 when Vista was "hot" (according to the mainstream press), Microsoft spread Vista buses to promote the operating system. Microsoft also resorted to using celebrities to promote Vista as we noted some days ago when covering the Sugababes move. Now it turns out that Microsoft will use both celebrities and buses to promote Vista 7. Oh, deja vu!

In addition to this, let it be remembered that Vista was hailed by Microsoft in 2007, with the conformist press acting as "yes men". Our reader "Goblin" wrote earlier in the day: "It actually appears a little worse than that, a claimed Microsoft engineer explains how realistic reports about Microsoft products are€ dealt with at Redmond. Why let problems of Vista get in the way of your MS career...say its great, get promoted!?!"

As we showed before, Microsoft assaults critics of Vista 7 and bribes ("rewards") those who praise it. To quote part of Goblin's analysis:

Whilst the content of the letter is nothing that hasn’t been covered here before, what is interesting is a comment a little further down the page by a claimed former Microsoft engineer.

You are so right. As a former engineer at Microsoft since the early days, I witnessed a change in General Manager and Regional Vice President level management, where they punished converyors of realistic feedback and only escalated good feedback to show good results on their commitments so they can get promoted and get good performance reviews, then move on to higher paying jobs. It got worse around the Vista timeframe. From what I hear from my former friends, this has not gotten any better.

Their actions helped advance their careers, while customers suffered, and their actions effected the company’s bottom line and public pereption on Microsoft’s core competency product.

So lets look at these comments. ”Punished realistic comments” I expect most people who have a blog and have posted dissatisfaction in Microsoft products have been “punished”. There certainly a lot of that going on at comp.os.linux.advocacy when a post is made that upsets someone with a Microsoft opinion.

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and I would agree. My opinion is that Steve Ballmer was well aware of the Vista shortcomings prior to it hitting the market, but by then far too much money had been spent on “the project” and they were committed for release, at the very least to recoup as much of their investment as they could. The good early reports are convenient since Mr Ballmer can put that as a justification for releasing Vista and in my opinion explains why the claimed Microsoft engineer was stating the good comments were made to further careers.

Actually, according to unsealed/leaked E-mails (deposition period) from Steve Ballmer and other people of executive ranks, they all knew very well that Vista was trouble, even ahead of its release. It did not prevent them from pretending for years that it was a fantastic operating system. We are seeing some of the same symptoms right now with Vista 7.

"Linux doesn't have to worry much about competition," writes an anonymous person in reply to the above.€ "It appears that€ Microsoft will collapse from within due to mismanagement.€ € They can't€ compete on an even playing ground, and can only win if they monopolise€ the market, which it appears they are doing with their .NET and€ Silverlight streaming video product." ⬆