Engadget notes that the "Vista Capable" program MS rolled out in 206 may come back to haunt them:

It looks like that little lawsuit over "Vista Capable" stickers on PCs could now be about to get quite a bit bigger, as a federal judge has now bestowed class-action status on the suit, which accuses Microsoft of misleading marketing. More specifically, as the AP reports, the suit alleges that the "Vista Capable" stickers slapped on PCs during the 2006 holiday season created an "artificial demand" for the computers, and "inflated prices for computers that couldn't be upgraded to the full-featured version of Vista." As we've seen, those stickers even took in at least one higher-up at Microsoft itself, who has made his thoughts on the program quite well known.

I'm not a big fan of these sorts of suits, but I do like the public black eye this kind of publicity elicits. I'm sure that a bunch of marketing drones at Microsoft thought this was a great idea; I'm equally certain that there were a few lonely voices from the developer ranks asking who they thought they were kidding.

Sadly for MS, this could end up being more than just a black eye. The spiral down to irrelevance is well under way at MS; the betting should now be on when the 1980's IBM scale layoffs will arrive. If they manage to outsmart themselves and buy Yahoo, it'll be even sooner.

Technorati Tags: marketing, stupidity