"The truth is we're not that dumb, and we are not that smart"

So said Coca-Cola President Donald R. Keough in 1985 as the chastened company reintroduced Classic Coke after many consumers panned New Coke.  He meant not too dumb to have wasted millions on the new product, and not that smart to have created the controversy merely to generate buzz.

Credit to Forrester for making me revisit that episode as it calls Microsoft Vista the New Coke. Good analogy - for all practical purposes, Microsoft has killed Classic (XP) when most consumers wanted to continue with it. It is selling Vista's look and feel (as Coke tried to do when Pepsi increasingly had a cooler market image) when customers want performance and security and would rather spend any extra dollars on new applications, not on another desktop OS.

In the meantime, markets are growing for Cherry (Mobile), Vanilla (Data Center optimization) and other OS flavors, but damn the torpedoes, Vista has to be made a success.

No wonder, I am having a tough time pegging Microsoft on Mr. Keough's dumb to smart scale