Spotted in Remond recently: the CEO of a leading PC maker who was there to grab Monkey Boy by the lapels and shake some sense into him. They’re furious about Vista. Sure, publicly they’re saying Vista is fine. Privately they’re going apeshit. They were expecting an OS that would spark all sorts of new demand. Instead they’ve got a nightmare on their hands. They’ve got customers demanding downgrades. They’ve got machines that take forever to boot up. Meanwhile our Macs boot up in seconds. These guys are telling Redmond to make Vista work more like OS X. Yeah. As if.

This particular hardware CEO has had the wonderful experience of trying to show off his company’s latest coolest laptop and having it churn … and churn … and churn … and then freeze … and then need to be shut down and rebooted … and churn … and churn … while his audience sat there forcing a smile and trying to be polite and noticing little tiny trickles of steam rising out of CEO’s collar. Startup took five minutes from the time he produced the laptop from his briefcase. Felt like five hours.

This company is investing millions into new laptop designs and has made some amazingly cool products, from a hardware perspective. (They’re still not Mac level, but for the PC market, they’re doing some pretty amazing stuff.) But all their magic gets overshadowed by the horror show that is Vista. This particular CEO forced the Borg to send engineers to sit down with his engineers and make a list of all the things that are fucked up about Vista. They came up with 180 key pain points. One hundred and eighty! Then the Borgtards went back to Mordor and were supposed to set about fixing them. You can guess how much actually happened then.

Finally in frustration the CEO himself flew to Redmond and attempted to beat Monkey Boy about the head and neck with one of this company’s non-working laptops. Security was called. Beastmaster brought in, along with Ozzie and Mundie. Promises made. Assurances given. Blah blah mwah mwah.

How do I know this story? Well, ask yourself whether in all this confusion some of the hardware guys might be reaching out to us hoping to license OS X. Let’s just say conversations have occurred. But we’re not budging. We only bring them in because we get off hearing their sob stories. We tape them and then watch the best parts later. It’s way too much fun watching these guys twist in the wind. Like I told this CEO, You guys all went around crowing about how it made so much sense to surf on top of all that great innovation being done at Microsoft, and how Apple could never, ever keep up, not in a zillion years. Well, you made your bed, pal. Now lie in it.