Microsoft kicks off the $300 million Vista salvage operation

Gizmodo:

Microsoft's $300 million campaign to return fire after Apple's "Mac vs. PC" ads with our buddy John Hodgman—which, like it or not, were a wildly successful campaign and definitely helped shape the public's perception of Vista—has begun with this image from microsoft.com

...It makes sense that Microsoft is going for a more conceptual ad here, rather than tick off a list of everything that people should perceive Vista is good at (they already do that on the page the ad points to). I can think of a lot of other future installments, like "At one point, everyone thought witches walked among us" or "At one point, people thought they could turn lead into gold," or "At one point, people thought that it was a good idea to s*** into ditches alongside the city streets."

A few of the choice comments:

Goes to show just how "uncool" MSFT is. Even their ads to say they don't suck, suck.

You mean it's not a good idea to s*** in a ditch? So wait, because the world isn't flat - Vista doesn't suck? That was a perception, that the world was flat. Is Microsoft saying that Vista sucking is just a perception? No, it's a fact. Vista sucks b***s, it's got gaping holes and bugs and so on. I'm a PC guy, but I can still smell crap in the ditch when it's present.

Do I have to install Silverlight to view it? And what the hell is up with microsoft.com?! My first time on the site but WOW it blows and is impossible to navigate!

I haven't used Vista extensively in a long time, but the bugs I had on it were so minor yet so frequent that they frustrated me to no end and I've lost a lot of reason to go back to it...

Completing the tone-deaf quality of the whole campaign is the ship in the illustration -- a design in use about 400 years AFTER Columbus, when round-the-world voyages were routine...

At one point people thought Vista would be good... Then it shipped.

At one point, people thought XP sucked.

At one point, everyone bought our products because there was no other choice.

So i go to microsoft.com and it tells me i should install Silverlight. ok. i download and try to install it. installer tells me i already have a 'newer' version installed. original page still says i should install plugin to 'experience' silverlight. microsoft fails on all fronts all the time. why cant they get it right? why is that? why?

If these are the things that are supposed to be the reason to switch, then Vista is even more dead in the water than i thought. Every single one of those can be done better with non MS software.

At one point Microsoft made passably decent products.

I hope MS aren't spending much on the advert, 'cos I can't think how it could be worse. Is that supposed to be a drawing of the Nina, the Pinta or the Santa Maria, or a frigate from Nelson's navy, circa 1800?

I don't much care for Vista. I don't really feel like UAC is an elegant solution-- it works, but it's the computer equivalent of having a ruler slapped across your fingers whenever you do something ill-advised on your PC. Couldn't they have come up with a less intrusive-- or at least, less annoying-- answer? I hate DWM-- it's such a neat concept, but the implementation is just wonktacular-- and I wish they'd figured out a way to do that kind of seamlessly, instead of making it a giant resource suck-hole. It's not even about having the RAM to run Vista properly-- I do-- but it's about not wasting what you've got. I appreciate that Vista's more secure than XP, by and large, and decidedly so when comparing XP at this point in its lifetime to Vista now-- but give me a copy of XP and a copy of nLite and I'd be much happier. I don't want my OS to be a big drain on my system resources-- I want something snappy and really, really lightweight. It's a consideration I also make when I'm weighing any comparable softwares. I don't really care for bloat. And Vista-- at least, for the foreseeable future until even every cheap Dell box is running a quad-core, 8GB RAM setup-- is just using too much of the system resources for my tastes.