As with anytime I try to take a blogging break something really gets under my skin and it draws me back in. 

I'm not even going to quote the moronic foolishness that inspired this post.  But to summarize: a Microsoft product manager named Gavriella Schuster clearly thinks her customers are so stupid that they won't recognize a painfully tactless ploy to sell an Operating  System that no one is interested in.

Or, in other words, she's suggesting Corporate customers who want to skip Vista deploy it anyway because the time it would take for Windows 7 is too long.  So she suggests corporations spend the money on two rollouts instead.

In making her argument she passes off misleading statements to make her case.  Such as...

Talk to your application vendors to find out how long they intend to provide support for their application running in Windows XP and when they plan to support their application running in Windows 7.

Newsflash: Right now there is not one vendor I've spoken to, not one, that has any plans to stop supporting XP.  They'd have to be fools to even consider it. 

She goes on to make this argument...

We expect deployment and application migration from Windows XP to Windows 7 to be similar in effort to going from Windows XP to Windows Vista. As I mentioned above, there is a great deal of compatibility between both Windows Vista and Windows 7, as we are not introducing any major architectural changes. Our customers who focus efforts in getting their applications to work on Windows Vista will ease future migration to Windows 7 and help accelerate their Windows 7 deployment

Newsflash: Problems that come up in migrations are always from UNEXPECTED ISSUES!  Every vendor I've ever spoken to has promised a smooth migration so the above paragraph holds about as much weight as someone trying to sell me the Brooklyn bridge.

Honestly the whole post was offensive.  Beyond the fact that she's speaking to IT people as if they were 5 year olds she's giving advice that is clearly in her company's own best interest while pretending to have altruistic motives (the underlying message being "our customers are too stupid to realize I'm trying to trick them")

It's one the the truest examples I've ever seen of Microsoft being completely out of touch with it's customers.

I've let my experiments with Linux fall to the wayside in recent months because of other time constraints.  But Ms. Schuster has encouraged me to kick them back into high gear. 

Maybe with a little extra effort I can just not use Windows at all anymore.

Addendum: This might seem like a mindless rant but I assure you it's not.  The point I'm trying to make is how deeply offensive customers find it when their vendors try to trick and/or bully them into doing something they don't want to do.  Vista is a lost cause and has been since its release.  They aren't going to sell me on it this late in the game.  But by not accepting the loss and choosing to push it harder they are souring me on Windows 7 and their corporate brand in general which is the last thing they want to do.