The least of their problems

Newsweek has an article by Daniel Lyons about Vista:

"Nobody here looks at Vista as a fiasco," says Brad Brooks, a Microsoft marketing vice president. If that's true, and nobody at Microsoft thinks Vista has been a public-relations nightmare, then the company is in trouble. Vista first shipped in January 2007, after several delays, and immediately had problems. It was sluggish. It had trouble going to sleep and waking up. It wouldn't work with some printers and accessories. Users launched a massive online petition begging Microsoft not to discontinue its old operating system, XP, which is stable, fast and, after six years of patches, pretty reliable. Many consumers like me, who'd bought new PCs loaded with Vista, reloaded them with XP.
Microsoft seems to be getting the message. Working in collaboration with its PC-maker partners, it says it has ironed out the glitches. It has embarked on a $300 million advertising blitz aimed at rehabbing Vista's reputation. But that too has gotten off to a rocky start. Microsoft teamed Jerry Seinfeld with Bill Gates in ads, and then, after two weeks, announced there would be no more Seinfeld. Microsoft says this was the plan all along. More likely, it was reacting to the fact that the quirky ads made no sense. Also, hiring a TV star from the 1990s only added to the impression that Microsoft is stuck in a time warp, at a time when Apple is seen as the king of cool and is gaining market share.
Meanwhile, Apple's Mac computers, which run Apple's OS X operating system instead of Windows, have been gaining share, reaching 11 percent of the U.S. consumer market, according to researcher NPD. That's a small slice compared with Microsoft, whose software runs on 90 percent of the world's PCs. But Apple users tend to be the kind of people marketers refer to as "influencers" or "tech elites," the in-the-know folks who adopt the coolest new technology and set trends. Apple's highly effective "I'm a Mac" ads have done a great job of positioning Apple as the machine for hipsters, and Windows-based PCs as the choice for dorks. Remember how AOL used to be cool, but then became the service used only by people who didn't know any better? Microsoft is heading down that path. "You fly business class today, and it's nothing but Macs," says a former Microsoft executive, who's now carrying a Mac himself with Vista loaded on it.