90% + of windowsOS sales are to OEMs like HP, Lenovo, Dell, and so on. To them the marketing is simple: ‘Buy Windows to preinstall because if you don’t your computers won’t sell. People won’t buy a no-OS computer, and people will return a computer if they bring it home and find it’s Linux and won’t run any of their windows-only apps that they paid good money for.’

A lot of ancillary ‘windowsOS sales’ are to developers: getting them to develop programs for windows rather than for OSX, Linux, Java. Winning this battle is widely thought to be the edge in the Windows-OS2 war. Marketing to developers involves making developer tools available, publishing the information developers need to work with windowsOS, hand-holding, ego-boosting evangelism.

Not too many windowsOS sales are directly to us users. The days are long gone since we stood in lines outside stores to be able to purchase Win95.

So, to get at more of what you mean, if I were MSFT, I would market to developers and users both at once in print and TV ads: showcasing ‘cheap’ hardware that consumers ’settle for’ because we are not ‘cool’ enough to get Apple gear is ridiculous. Instead, highlight software: all those wonderful programs that help you do what you want to do. Then end it all with ‘Only on Windows.’ This showcases, enhances the developers, makes them feel appreciated, and brings them money with further sales; and it stresses what you can do on a windowsOS computer that is simply unavailable on a Mac or Linux or BSD box.

A further wrinkle to this might be killing the ‘Mac vs PC’ ads by parody: the PC shows off this new program and how it made his life easier. Mac looks on enviously, until PC asks, ‘Why don’t you use this, it’s great!’ and Mac glumly answers, ‘That’s not available on a Mac…’

WindowsOS is a whole digital ecosystem, more than just the OS and the MSFT programs. Stress that, and MSFT should manage to hold on to a slowly-fading monopoly.

Once W7 is out, mount a campaign emphasizing its strong points to convince the installed base of *hundreds of millions* XP users to upgrade. Provide a compelling argument: it runs great on netbooks, I don’t know, but Microsoft should be able to explain why its OS is better than XP and Vista.