• Vista Wallpapers
• Windows Wallpapers

In the course of our talk, ZDNet Editor in Chief Larry Dignan asked me what I would do to fix Vista’s tarnished brand if I were in charge of Microsoft’s marketing for a day. OK, I’ll take the job, but on two conditions: First, I want face time with Steve Ballmer and Steven Sinofsky. Second, I want some of those dollars Steve was going to fork over to buy Yahoo, because cleaning up the Vista mess is gonna cost some bucks.

The context of the conversation, of course, is Microsoft’s campaign to “fight back” against Vista’s poor reputation and Apple’s relentless Vista-bashing ad series. Mary Jo Foley has more details in her report from Microsoft’s Worldwide Partner Conference in Houston. I’m hearing the same messages in my conversations with Microsoft executives and product managers.

In classic Microsoft style, they can be distilled into three key points:

* Hardware and software partners weren’t ready for the launch. As Mary Jo reports, Windows honcho Brad Brooks “acknowledged that partners stopped believing that Microsoft would ever manage to ship Vista and thus didn’t prepare adequately for the launch of the operating system.”
* Many of the architectural changes, especially those involving security and device drivers, caused existing hardware and software to work poorly or not at all. Most of those issues have been fixed in the past 18 months, and the exceptions are generally older products whose owners have decided not to invest in Vista support.
* Windows Vista as it exists today is not the same product that Microsoft shipped back in November 2006. Service Pack 1 is the biggest fix, of course, but Microsoft has been delivering bug fixes and compatibility updates continually via Windows Updates

There’s a great deal of truth in that summary, but it’s not the whole truth. It misses the mark dramatically by not acknowledging the negativity in the market and in the press and confronting it head on. More importantly, it doesn’t include any serious ‘fessing up to the series of blunders that Microsoft has committed over the course of Vista’s development and release. This week one of Microsoft’s top executives admitted that the changes in Vista “broke a lot of things” and “caused … a lot of pain.” Usually, that sort of confession is followed by “I’m sorry” and “Here’s what we’re going to do to make up for that pain.”