Walter Mossberg

The Oct. 13, 2005, installment of Walt Mossberg's Personal Technology column in the Wall Street Journal was a detailed guide for people planning to buy personal computers in advance of Windows Vista's launch. One paragraph in particular got Microsoft's attention.

"You also won’t have to worry about Vista if you buy one of Apple Computer’s Macintosh computers, which don’t run Windows," Mossberg wrote. "Every mainstream consumer doing typical tasks should consider the Mac. Its operating system, called Tiger, is better and much more secure than Windows XP, and already contains most of the key features promised for Vista."

At 9:08 a.m. Redmond time, Microsoft's Padmanand Warrier dashed off an e-mail to colleagues at the company who had been hashing out the system requirements for various levels of Windows Vista logos.

"A premium experience as defined by Walt = Apple," the message read, linking to the column, citing that paragraph and stressing the importance of addressing the issue.

The e-mail thread (PDF, 25 pages) was among the latest batch of internal Microsoft documents disclosed late Monday in the class-action lawsuit over the company's "Windows Vista Capable" logo and marketing program. Many of the key e-mails were excerpted in earlier filings in the case -- showing Microsoft relaxing the requirements for the logo to accommodate Intel, and then scrambling to deal with the resulting backlash from Hewlett-Packard and others in the industry.

Beyond that, in this era of a million bloggers, the latest e-mails show how a few words from an influential newspaper columnist can still cause a stir inside a giant company. Mossberg's column sparked this defense from Microsoft development manager Richard Russell, in an e-mail reply about 20 minutes after the first message.

"My take away from Walt's article is that we have failed to communicate Vista's value," Russell wrote. "As such, I don't understand your point. Apple doesn't differentiate between 'standard' and 'premium'. Vista does. Vista will give a very good experience and (add) lots of value even if it is not running on a premium system. Vista is designed to run a very wide ranging set of systems from the minimally capable to the incredibly capable -- Apple doesn't do that."

Of course, in looking back at these exchanges, we have the benefit of knowing how Windows Vista unfolded from there. In hindsight, who was right? Mossberg or Microsoft?