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.

Recently Microsoft posted their profits for 2007. Despite Vista being one of the worst disasters to hit the computer systems markets since Windows ME, Microsoft seemed to come out way ahead... or did they?

There has been a meme going around in the Linux world that Vista is really a dog and that Microsoft is only managing to make its numbers by jamming the new OS down the throats of unwilling customers. Now I admit I don't use Vista and haven't spent a lot of time benchmarking it against Ubuntu or Mac OS X or any of the other non-Microsoft alternatives.

Around this time last year, computer manufactures were trying to convince people not to wait until Vista came out to buy a new computer. To that end Microsoft devised what was (and still is) considered to be one of the most confusing marketing campaigns ever.

A federal judge has said consumers may go ahead with a class-action lawsuit against Microsoft over the way it advertised computers loaded with Windows XP as capable of running the Vista operating system.

The lawsuit said Microsoft's labeling of some PCs as "Windows Vista Capable" was misleading because many of those computers were not powerful enough to run all of Vista's features, including the much-touted "Aero" user interface.

Microsoft has finally outlined the extent to which Windows Vista was unfit for the marketplace when it launched six months ago.

There's a new twist in the "Windows Vista Capable" lawsuit that brought us all those behind-the-scenes e-mails last week: Microsoft has petitioned a federal appeals court in an attempt to overturn the judge's Feb. 22 decision granting the lawsuit class-action status.

I knew it. Vista simply wasn’t ready for prime time. Some internal documents that emerged from a class-action lawsuit over Vista Capable illustrated that hardware vendor, Dell, pushed back on Microsoft to fix issues with Vista before launching. Microsoft knew fully well of Dell’s feedback as early as Aug 2005.

Not only did Windows Vista - billed by Microsoft as its biggest operating system for 10 years - fail to distinguish Microsoft's latest fiscal year from previous, non-Windows-Vista years, but Microsoft also missed its own expectations by several million dollars.