"David Smith commented that Gartner will not bash MS if MS chooses to slip Vista."

--Jamin Spilzer, Microsoft

Summary: Gartner continues its long tradition of Microsoft marketing and over in Asia we find more new evidence of shameless marketing that boggles the mind

ONE reason to never take Gartner seriously is its incestuous relationship with clients like Microsoft. As we showed last year, it was Gartner that participated in the push for businesses to move to Windows Vista, which even Microsoft admits to be a failure. Gartner analysts are salesmen in suits and they are groomed by major investors such as Larry Ellison and Bill Gates, not just their major clients. Their reports are paid for by those who order them.

“Gartner analysts are salesmen in suits and they are groomed by major investors such as Larry Ellison and Bill Gates, not just their major clients.”A few days ago we found Gartner urging a move from XP to Vista 7 (it said the same about Vista back in 2007). Given that large companies such as Intel are struggling to migrate to Vista 7, what is this whole assessment really based on?

Let it be emphasised that in the past week there has been no new article about "Vista" (with this particular word in the headline), compared to just 6 clusters about "Windows 7" (mostly promotional, not news). Based on this quick survey in Google News, we can only reach the conclusion that the $300,000,000-$500,000,000 marketing campaign of Vista 7 is nearly over. Maybe it's not entirely over, but people don't hear so much about it anymore. Journalists are not being served ghost-written material to publish, along with 'free' computers sometimes. Several months ago we showed a Vista 7 coffee shop (maybe not just in Paris) serving as part of Microsoft's marketing campaign, not to mention those 777 bloggers in Korea. Look what Microsoft is doing in Taiwan right now: [source]

Microsoft has launched a Windows 7-themed restaurant in Taipei to promote its new operating system, an official with the US firm said Monday, on the eve of Asia's biggest IT trade show.

Microsoft used similar campaigns for Vista in India (involving coffee). It's rather pathetic marketing.

Watch how "Goodwill Industries" (finely named) engages in Microsoft brainwash with Word 2007 while ODF and OpenOffice.org in the Malaysian government are being fought against not just with Steve Ballmer's lobbying of the prime minister but also a couple of hype 'placements' [1, 2]. It's marketing masqueraded as news, based on the content. ⬆