Steven Sinofsky’s motto should be, in the spirit of Memorial Day: “Loose lips sink ships.” Office development proceeded with scant disclosure under his tenure. Little has changed since he assumed the role as Microsoft’s senior veep for the Windows and Windows Live Engineering group. Open disclosure and dialog punctuated past Windows development—not that the process did much for Vista.

Now Steven is talking Windows 7 to CNET News.com. But he’s not saying much. There’s even a Microsoft “Communicating Windows 7″ blog post, credited to Chris Flores, defending the say-no-more interview.

Microsoft seemingly has plenty of reasons to keep mum about Seven, starting with freezing Vista sales. The company claims 140 million Vista licenses shipped. But that number is deceptive. Based on interviews with analysts and enterprise IT managers, the majority of licenses are on new PCs where Vista is never deployed. Most businesses are stripping off Vista and using downgrade rights to install Windows XP.

By that measure, Vista is a disaster. It’s the Titanic hitting the only iceberg within 1,000 kilometers and sinking in five minutes. Windows customers waited three to nearly six years for Vista (depending on when they deployed XP). There should have been a wild rush for Vista. But the Vista, ah, view, was more stinking landfill than garden. People are selling their Vista homes and moving back to the XP neighborhood. Yeah, yeah, I mixed metaphors.
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