You probably already hate me for defending Microsoft’s much-maligned operating system.

In reality, however, the "I'm a Mac/I'm a PC" campaign relies on a couple of very old-fashioned sales propositions: Macs don't crash, and they come with software that lets you do the things you want to do. This basic sales proposition has worked very well—so well, in fact, that hardly anyone noted that Apple's first Intel Macs ran miserably with the paltry memory they came with (just as miserably as the early underpowered Vista machines that PC makers dumped in stores and Microsoft got dinged for).

You can see Microsoft's quandary here. Emphasizing the things that are good about Vista—a standby mode that works the way it's supposed to and essentially makes Vista laptops "instant on," an ability to deal with literally hundreds of thousands of devices and make them work right as soon as you plug them in, painless software installation, and stability—would have admitted that Microsoft's earlier operating systems just didn't get it right. Could Microsoft have done this? Who knows? Clearly, Microsoft had no issue slamming its own past performance on the security front, so it may as well have tried talking directly about why Vista works better.

Then again, it's easy enough to come up with the pitch that would have worked if only Microsoft had made it. What's certain is that the one feature besides security that Microsoft chose to hang its coat on—the three dimensional Flip program-switcher that nobody has ever used except for Microsoft executives looking for something to show off on a big screen—was a loser. It just made Microsoft look like the old guy striding onto the dance floor, pointing his finger in the air, and leaving everyone wondering, "That's your best move?"

Undoubtedly, there will be people out there ready to write in and gripe that, hey, their computer did crash and Vista ate their kids' homework. I'm sure it's happened. I'm sure there are quirks in there that I haven't met and that would infuriate me. The truth of it is that every year personal computers—and operating systems that run them—become more complex and quirks come up. Try plugging a printer into a Mac without the right driver. Try installing a piece of software in Ubuntu, the most popular flavor of Linux, that's not in the official Ubuntu software repository. Both Mac OS and Ubuntu are fine operating systems. For most of what you want to do, they work as they should. Which is great. But are they dramatically more intuitive or more reliable than Vista? Not in my experience.

At this point, it's way too late to revive the reputation of Vista—heck, if Microsoft's legions of marketing people can't do it, I sure can't, either. In all likelihood it will go down, undeservedly, in the list of Microsoft failures, together with the disastrous Windows Millennium Edition. The best that Microsoft can hope for is that Vista, just like Windows ME (bet you don't even know what that is), will be quickly forgotten and, eventually, forgiven.

Still, it's worth pointing out that Vista is ... pretty good. For the next few years, most of the world's computers will still be running some version of Windows, but you can already see, off in the distance, the day when the Microsoft operating-system hegemony (which already, as Bill Gates anticipated years ago, matters less and less as we spend more time inside the browser) will be gone. We won't have Microsoft to kick around anymore in the same way, but it'll be a good thing if we have Windows in some form, or the alternatives will become as ossified and problem-prone as Windows at its worst.