I’m on my way up to San Francisco to meet Ernie the Attorney. I think I’ll have a good stiff drink. After this week… 🙂

I see that someone in Acer is being quoted about Vista having “major problems.” Oh, I love this game. A marketer, down in Australia, working for one of our partners, gets to attack Microsoft through an unprofessional Web site that doesn’t try to do any fact checking or give two sides of the story. Well, enjoy your time at the top of Memeorandum.

Really, no matter what I, or anyone else says, there is no winning at this game. The Xbox team denies, on its blog, that Xbox programmers are moving over to Windows and confirms that Windows Vista is now feature complete so there won’t be any massive rewritting of Windows Vista code. The Windows team (and, yes, I’ve been calling around to friends on the team who’ll tell me the unpleasant truth) are totally denying that they will be rewriting any major pieces of code. They are in bug fix mode now, not in rewrite mode.

Even the evidence denies this story. At Mix06 last week we had Media Center PCs for people to use, running, gasp, Windows Vista. An entire keynote (damn cool demos too) ran on Windows Vista and it didn’t crash the entire time. That doesn’t sound like something that needs a 60% rewrite. Or something that isn’t on schedule to ship.

But, here’s a fun experiment. Why don’t you hang out with the guys who run Neowin? They religiously watch our binaries for changes (they often know about new features before I do, because they get leaks of the latest builds and look inside each DLL looking for new stuff). Ask them to track how much of our code changes between now and launch.

Loren Heiny says that maybe what the guy is talking about is actually past tense. That’s very possible. Windows Vista has new UI code, a rewritten audio stack, a rewritten networking stack, dramatically new code in Windows Media Center and the Tablet PC and speech recognition and browser pieces. So, over the entire five years that Vista has been worked on there is a good chunk of new code in there (and all the code has been recompiled with a new compiler, which adds more security features, among other things) but there is no way that 60% of Windows Vista is going to be rewritten between now and November. That’s just ridiculous on its face.

It’s not nice to tell our branding folks that their work sucks, but sorry, it’s so obvious now that I just can’t pretend to like it. Dare Obasanjo’s post demonstrates what’s wrong very well.

We need names that are:

1) Consistent.
2) Simple.
3) Easy to tell a friend (Try saying Windows Live Local five times really fast, for instance).
4) One word that’s less than eight characters (Google wins!)
5) A domain that we own. Spend the money if we don’t have it.

Here's some quickfire blogging before I go to sleep.

Larry Osterman, a developer who's worked at Microsoft for 21.5 years, laughs at the report that Microsoft would rewrite 60% of Vista in two months: "Anyone who's ever worked on a project that involves more than a thousand or so lines of code understands how utterly laughable that is."

Yeah, Steve Rowe, I'm disappointed that blogs didn't jump on the headline faster and harder too. But, that just shows why corporations need blogs too (to make sure things stay factual out there and participate in the conversation, even when the conversation goes ugly).

Scott Byer, of Adobe, explains why Adobe can't release Intel versions of all its Macintosh applications right now (universal ones are coming soon, he says). Microsoft's Rick Schaut adds more to the conversation.

Yes, I too saw Charlie Owen's demo of a new RSS aggregator for Media Center at Mix06 and I too was enthralled with it like Giovanni Gallucci was.

I've been through many of the notes from Mix06. Here's my favorites. Randy Holloway. Dion Hinchcliffe. Alex Barnett. I love what Trapper Markelz said: Everywhere you went, you heard lots about RSS. Kelly Goto (awesome designer!) said Mix06 was "quite an event." Chris Adams. Mike Swanson reveals that we're gonna make Mix06's content available to everyone for free. The Ajaxian blog reports on Ajax stuff at Mix (Atlas) and says "the demos of WPF/E were very impressive." WPF/E lets you run Windows Presentation Foundation applications on both Windows and Macs. More to come on that soon. Oh, Harry Pierson reports that at Mix they were promising Linux and Firefox support too.

Tara Hunt is a pinko marketer. Marketing folks? You MUST read her blog for the past two weeks. Good stuff, along the lines of Cluetrain Manifesto (Doc Searls linked to her, thanks). Tara, you should do a book with Malcolm Gladwell.

Microsoft releases RSS in CRM? Yeah, cool. (That's on Satya Nadella's blog. He's corporate VP on the Dynamics team and they are announcing a bunch of stuff over the next week. He's also on Channel 9, along with a bunch of other Dynamics team members). I love the name of the "Freaky Microsoft Dynamics CRM 3.0 Blog."