When a political leader in the old Soviet Union fell out of favor, he would just ... disappear. All signs of his name and image would be erased from public view and the non-person himself would never again be seen amongst the country's leaders standing atop Lenin's Tomb in Red Square.
That's the way it is for Windows Vista at this week's Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference in New Orleans. It's clear that Microsoft has already moved on to Windows 7 and Vista is like a failed marriage that a divorcee has long since left behind.
Throughout keynote speeches and breakout sessions, Microsoft executives and employees have not even mentioned what is, after all, the company's current desktop OS product. It's as if a memo went out -- maybe one did -- prior to the conference to refrain from uttering the Vista name and get off-message, the message being Windows 7.
So far the only time this reporter has even heard Vista mentioned at all at WPC was a couple of references by Bill Veghte, senior vice president of the Windows Business Group, during his Monday keynote. The reason he made those references was because he was, first, promising that Windows 7 would be an easy upgrade from Vista and, second, that Microsoft is working mightily to avoid the compatibility problems Vista had early on with third-party hardware and software.
The silence is in stark contrast to last year's partner conference when Microsoft executives, after taking heat from competitors such as Apple and Google, did some trash talking about Vista. "You thought the sleeping giant was still sleeping? Well, we've woken up now, and it's time to take our message forward," said a combative Brad Brooks, corporate vice president for Windows consumer product marketing, vowing to fight back against Vista's detractors.
But that rhetoric was apparently empty. Take a walk around the Microsoft booths on the exhibition show floor here and nowhere is there a mention of Windows Vista. Not on the signage above the product demos, not on the huge blue banners that that simply have the numeral "7" on them -- as if that's all that matters now.
But something has to be running on all those desktop computers Microsoft is using on the show floor to demonstrate everything from its desktop apps, to its Visual Studio and new Azure development tools, to its Dynamics ERP and CRM software. Windows 7? Windows XP?
When asked what's running on the desktops in a booth, a Microsoft employee said he doesn't know and closes a number of windows to get down to the desktop screen. "Yeah, it's Vista," he says somewhat dismissively, not giving it another glance.
