Microsoft Admits Windows Vista Mistakes, Criticizes Apple AdsMicrosoft Admits Windows Vista Mistakes, Criticizes Apple Ads

Microsoft is now acknowledging it screwed up with its initial launch of Windows Vista, and is ready to try again.

"We broke a lot of things. We know that, and we know it caused you a lot of pain. It got customers thinking, hey, is Windows Vista a generation we want to get invested in?" So Brad Brooks, Microsoft's VP of Windows Vista consumer marketing, fessed up publicly this week.

Speaking at a keynote address at Microsoft's annual Worldwide Partner Conference, Brooks signified that Microsoft was ready to admit mistakes and reposition itself to tell a better story about Windows Vista, to counter attacks by rival Apple and let customers know that Vista is finally stable and ready.

"You thought the sleeping giant was still sleeping, well we woke it up and it's time to take our message forward," Brooks said. "We've faced these challenges before, and we're going to solve them again. There's a conversation going on in the marketplace today and it's just plain awful. We've got to get back on the front foot."

He pointed to selected negative quotes from Windows XP's first year as evidence that operating system launches can often be rocky.

In the coming weeks and months, Microsoft will launch a huge advertising campaign that's been reported to be worth hundreds of millions of dollars. Microsoft advertised Vista to small businesses in The Wall Street Journal and USA Today the last two weeks, and plans a much larger wave of ads under the tagline "Free the People." Brooks gave a taste of what's coming with a few swipes at Apple and some selected highlights of Windows Vista's features.

"We've got a pretty noisy competitor out there," Brooks said of Apple whose "I'm a Mac... and I'm a PC," commercials criticize Windows Vista. "You know it. I know it. It's caused some impact. We're going to start countering it. They tell us it's the iWay or the highway. We think that's a sad message. Software out there is made to be compatible with your whole life."

As part of that compatibility message, Microsoft will work to reverse the widely held belief, informed by early troubles upon the operating system's launch, that Vista isn't compatible with many applications and devices.

The company says 77,000 devices are compatible with Windows Vista today (double the number when the operating system launched) as well as 99% of the major business applications. The company has launched two Web sites, Windows Vista Small Business Assurance and the Windows Vista Compatibility Center, to help turn these perceptions around.

"Windows Vista is an investment in the long term," Brooks said. "When you make the investment into Windows Vista, it's going to pay it forward into the operating system we call Windows 7." All the more reason, Brooks said, to upgrade to Windows Vista sooner than later. Whether this message will find sympathetic ears, it's unclear. Even close partners like Intel are resisting en masse upgrades to Vista, and analyst firms have found a large number of companies claiming they'll wait until Windows 7.

Microsoft also intends to talk up Windows Vista's upgraded security, including features like BitLocker Encryption. According to Microsoft, Windows Vista had fewer than half the security vulnerabilities Windows XP had in its first year. Brooks even made a bold claim that Windows Vista was the most secure commercial operating system ever in its first year of release, and said "you don't hear Apple saying that," though he didn't lay out the evidence for that claim.

It appears that Microsoft will also frame Windows as "a kind of language," as that's how Brooks referred to it in his keynote. "There are over a billion users using it today," he said. "It's bigger than Mandarin Chinese, bigger than English, and like those it connects people. That's what Windows started, that's what Windows delivers today, that's where we're going.

Overall, the message Microsoft hopes to impart is that Windows Vista is ready, and that Microsoft will no longer take a back seat while word of mouth and Apple drive negative messaging about the company and Windows. It's a necessary step for Microsoft, and one the company should have taken the lead on before, rather than waiting until negativity became pervasive. Nevertheless, Microsoft is finally starting to come around to the fact that it can't just sit back and let others define it.