Did someone relieve themselves in Evan Blass' coffee today? After reading Evan's new Engadget article I'm almost positive that in a year or so we won't have any being called Microsoft shills, we will just have Vista and XP shills flaming up each other and an occasional Macvertisement who gets in the way.

For an article that reads like, "Redmond, go Pound Dirt (man I'm loving that saying)" and when you are done, come back and let my readers tell you how to make your operating system, Evan doesn't disclose any new useful information that I picked up on besides the usual bit about Vista being a late and ugly date. Well it's not really that bad but close. I can't truly fault Evan, I wanted to write much worse than what I wrote when I spent the best part of my evening mopping up after an apparently dangerous optional Nvidia driver from Windows Update that decided I didn't need to boot Vista anymore.Chris Pirillo is talking about influential defections en mass but remember: whether influential users are using Vista or not doesn't really matter. People who like Vista don't have two round ones to show up to a convention running it these days anyhow. What matters is what can Microsoft do to convince it's corporate partners that Vista is what's right for them.

There are more closet Microsoft shills out there than Mac customers these days. We talk more about the lack of a Gdrive, than a solid free SkyDrive release. Some people claim to distrust Microsoft so much that they would rather be seen with Michael Vick at a dog pound than own a Microsoft Passport ID. I really do want this conversation to go somewhere though.  

What we have here is failure to communicate! Microsoft if any of you decision makers are reading this, I think you all need to get a focus group to analyze what your innovators are doing with your OS and compare that to what your users are asking from you. You don't have the luxury of getting a good review unless your product is excellent. Read the improvement suggestions from the Engadget comments (if you can sift through the regurgitated has been 40 something's Macvertizements) read from the Channel 9 forums, listen to your customers and keep showing results with quality upgrades to Vista.

After all, Evan is right, all I have to show for my two Vista Ultimate purchases is a screen background I never use (other than to show people when they come check out my office just to hear them go, "Nice Monitor!" ...and a Bitlocker tool which doesn't help a whole lot to justify at what price you sold me Vista Ultimate.

Beyond that, I say--for the most part--Vista is a fine OS so far and I hope you keep it up, I hope Vista only gets better. But don't get me wrong, I also hope OSX gets better, I hope the new Google flavored Semantic Web Jr. keeps getting better, I hope Ray Ozzie's evolution of Clippy gets better, I hope Linux gets better. Did I mention Linux?