Speaking during the keynote address at Microsoft's annual Worldwide Partner Conference, Brad Brooks, Microsoft's VP of Windows Vista consumer marketing, disclosed the company's plans to counter Apple's "I'm a Mac" ads. The campaign is called "Free the People" and refers to making computing solutions available for everyone, under any form.

"We broke a lot of things. We know that, and we know it caused you a lot of pain. It got customers thinking, hey, is Windows Vista a generation we want to get invested in?" said Brad Brooks, adding that Microsoft needed to show that Vista is now worth looking into. The company behind the Windows OS hopes to achieve this result by countering Apple's attacks.

"You thought the sleeping giant was still sleeping, well we woke it up and it's time to take our message forward," Brooks said. "We've faced these challenges before, and we're going to solve them again. There's a conversation going on in the marketplace today and it's just plain awful. We've got to get back on the front foot [...] We've got a pretty noisy competitor out there," Brooks added, referring to Apple. "You know it. I know it. It's caused some impact. We're going to start countering it."

Brooks also made a rather bold statement in what regards Apple's attitude: "They tell us it's the iWay or the highway. We think that's a sad message." He concluded by saying: "Software out there is made to be compatible with your whole life."

Softpedia take: Apple's "I'm a Mac" ad campaign is indeed aggressive, to say the least. The commercials criticize Windows Vista verbally (and not only) in a very direct manner, almost bullying it, if you will. However, the Cupertino-based Mac maker had to do something to get people's attention - after all, the Mac was, and still is, much less popular than PCs. If there's anything that almost always works best in marketing, it's aggressiveness. Plus, Apple isn't wrong about most of the aspects surrounding Windows and PCs. The real issue probably lies within the fact that Apple has released one too many ads delivering the same message over and over again, which can get a little annoying.

Microsoft will launch its huge advertising campaign in the coming weeks. Reportedly, the campaign cost Microsoft hundreds of millions of dollars, according to InformationWeek.