True to its own idea that Vista is a perfect product (as demonstrated by the recent 5 things on Vista), Microsoft rather than improving the product plans to improve its perception it with a large marketing push. According to Mary Jo Foley they plan spending 300+ million dollars. A quote in the article shows the attitude of blaming everyone but themselves "partners stopped believing that Microsoft would ever manage to ship Vista and thus didn’t prepare adequately for the launch of the operating system". So all problems with Vista are due to third parties? Foolish at least. And what about launching a new Vista Compatibility Center only 18 months after releasing the product? Needless to say Microsoft claims Vista is perfect and users love it, but a vocal minority.

I beg to disagree... and I'm not alone. I found the article after reading " Fixing the Vista PR Disaster with More Marketing" in Bruce Eckel's blog. I agree with him on most issues. In particular it is true that "The number of critics are quite large, and the majority seem to be disaffected Microsoft customers who feel they have been abused. Attacking your customers, especially the technically-oriented ones that give advice to the others, is just going to make a bad situation much worse." As with the 5 things, claiming that people who have problems with Vista are idiots and people who couldn't make it work (and I consider myself in this group, despite my 18 months using it as my primary OS) won't bring any good to the cause.