Sir, did you know you’ve been drinking Vista?

Remember those commercials where there’s a guy drinking coffee and someone comes up to him and tells him it’s decaf?

On the heels of the – dare we say “cataclysmic” – failure of Vista, Microsoft’s most recent incarnation of its ubiquitous Windows Operating System, Redmond is getting ready to skip over that fiasco and move on to an even newer generation of the OS, titled Windows 7.

Or so we’re led to believe.

It turns out that Windows 7 is simply a re-skinned, exhaustively optimized version of Vista. The product has shed its birth name in favor of one that is not associated with the mediocre performance and extensive, totalitarian security warnings.

And I have to hand it to Microsoft and their marketing team. They really did take a lemon and make lemonade. Windows 7 is meeting with reactions that can only be described at 180 degrees from the chilly reception that Windows Vista received.