What Microsoft is doing now is not dissimilar to what Saddam Hussein did in 1990: until he invaded Kuwait he had been greatly feared in the Gulf and Middle East region. The fear was so great that when fellow Arab countries, Jordan and Saudi Arabia, detected planes flying towards Baghdad on June 6, 1981, they just kept quiet. They knew that there was but one target - Iraq's nuclear reactor - and the planes, which bore the Star of David, blew it up an hour or so later, causing the late Menachem Begin, then the prime minister of Israel, to utter the words "baruch hasham." (God be praised).

In 1990, when Hussein threatened his neighbour Kuwait, it didn't work. He sent troops to the border, it didn't work. Kuwait had been bolstered by American muscle; its oil tankers had often carried the US flag during the eight years when Iraq and Iran were at war. Finally, Saddam sent the troops in and for a while the Middle East reverberated with echoes of Kissinger's domino theory. But it all lasted just six months.

Saddam was much better at bluffing than the Microsoft hierarchy. He was able to maintain his charade until February 1991; his ground troops folded in four days flat when hit with Western military power and that was the end of him as a threat - even though George Dubya and his band of neocons tried to con people into believing otherwise in 2003.

Microsoft's threats are a direct outcome of the perilous sales of Vista. Stock prices are driven by confidence and if that is eroded, then things will start to go downhill. Microsoft's stock is held by a large number of pension funds and that is an indicator of the level of trust it enjoys. Earnings drive stock performance and if investors detect that the money isn't rolling in as smoothly as it apparently was in previous years, then the stock price will start to go south of the border.

There have been several stories about Vista sales; Microsoft has now started countering these by issuing statements about selling 40 million copies of the operating system. Of course, the fact that these are by and large sales of licences to OEMs has not been mentioned; the average punter thinks of them as consumer and retail sales and wonders why people continue to opine that Vista is a flop both financially and otherwise. There are no figures for Vista's Windows Genuine Advantage either - and that would be a true indication of the number of copies which are in use. When sales numbers are down 60 percent from XP, what do you call it?

Microsoft's description of Vista sales as being good reminds me of another Middle Eastern analogy: when the Palestine Liberation Organisation was forced to leave Beirut in 1982, following the Israeli invasion of that country and prolonged fighting, the late Yasser Arafat tried to spin it out as a great victory. His fellow Palestinian, George Habbash, made a comment similar to this: "If this is a victory, then we only need a few more like this and we will be holding our next annual general meeting in Fiji."

Get the point?

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