A Microsoft product manager couldn't correctly explain the "Vista Capable" marketing slogan, according to recent filings in a lawsuit that claims the company misled consumers with a prerelease Vista campaign last year.

Make no mistake about it, if you are using a Linux distribution, you are not a friend to the software giant in Redmond. For years, they have spread rumors and half-truths in an effort to curb any further attraction to Linux development.

The evidence shows that Microsoft’s marketing department has not done particularly well with Windows Vista. Almost every story you see about Vista is a negative one. Even I, as a Linux user, think that Vista is better than its reputation. But Microsoft’s marketing is not always a failure, it appears.

I’ve always wondered why there has yet to be a Linux distribution that has ventured into a big time marketing campaign for its Linux product. With Mac OSX stealing a lot of Microsoft’s market share due to a great marketing campaign with the “I’m a Mac, I’m a PC” television commercials, why have we yet to see any Linux commercials?

In a recent post I wrote called "Linux has no marketing, but what if it did?" I made the point that with Microsoft's Windows 7 OS coming out on October 22nd, there will be a blitz of marketing around it, and noted that there never is any such blitz promoting Linux.

Back in 2002, Jim Allchin was co-president of Microsoft's Platforms and Services Division and was, in his own words, "scared" of the momentum behind Linux, as noted in an email [PDF] sent to several of his direct reports. So what did Allchin do? As court documents in the Comes vs.

Microsoft has just launched a new advertising campaign, the “Mojave Experiment.” The idea of the new campaign is that a bunch of computer users who have negative impressions of Vista, but who have never used Vista, are shown a future version of Windows, codenamed “Mojave.” They are given a tour of this “new” version of Windows, asked for their impressions, and then told that “Mojave

A Web measurement firm Wednesday blamed a massive online marketing campaign aimed only at nternet Explorer (IE) users for skewing its April data, which said Mozilla's Firefox and Apple's Safari had lost significant amounts of market share.

Forty-four percent of businesses would consider moving to an operating system other than Microsoft Windows in order to avoid moving to Vista, according to systems appliance management firm Kace. The reluctance to step into Redmond's latest OS could prove to be a boon for competitors like Linux and Apple, not to mention makers of virtualization applications.