Masters of No Domain

So there, on the front page of the Wall Street Journal Thursday morning, I read that Jerry Seinfeld will be participating in a $300 million PR blitz-o-rama to promote Vista. (A PC Pro article reports the same thing.)

Really? Has it come to this?

According to the WSJ article, Microsoft believes that its Windows brand is languishing at best and at worst is getting its marketed butt kicked  by all those PC vs. Mac ads. Of course, they would never be the ones to say it, but Vista clearly has some quality problems as well. But, in Redmond-land, if something is not being sold, then it clear is a marketing problem, not a product problem. Thus, the throwing of $300 million and a famous celebrity at the Vista problem.

I recently went to OSCON, then LinuxWorld, and I cannot tell you how many times I overheard the conversation about people trying to "upgrade" back (backgrade?) to XP. And these were not conversations at the shows. These were in Starbucks, airports, public transportation... average folk who wanted nothing more than to figure out how to get back to XP. Their problems sounded eerily familar... a few of them were lamenting the lack of XP drivers for their new hardware. It was like being in the Linux community back in 2000 all over again.

Meanwhile, if anyone wanted to make a big announcement about a desktop push for Linux, now would be a good time. Strike while the iron is hot. The recent success of Linux on netbooks demonstrates that a real push into desktop share is possible--especially business desktops.

Yet no one seems ready to step up yet. The money is still in the enterprise, I am told. This is at once understandable, yet discouraging. I don't want to disparage anyone's bottom line, but it seems to me that the opportunity to win over a lot of hearts and minds is right here. Right now.

If more apps are what we need, then the tools here on LDN will help get more developers working on that goal. Everyone in the community has assets to contribute, there just needs to be someone to lead the call and get Linux moving where Vista clearly cannot get itself to go.