Microsoft's Brad Brooks at Windows 7's Oct. 22 launch event in New York City. (Microsoft photo)

Six months after Windows 7’s release, there’s a sense inside Microsoft that the company is back in the game. Users are happy, PC sales are rising, and the dark days of Windows Vista are starting to feel like a distant memory.

“Quite honestly, folks believe in Windows and Microsoft again,” said Brad Brooks, the Microsoft corporate vice president responsible for marketing Windows to consumers. “There was a little bit of testing of that faith for a while — we all know it — but everybody looks at this ... and we’re on a roll again.”

But there’s also a sense in the industry that the game is no longer the same.

In the three years that Microsoft spent reviving its flagship franchise, the focus of the industry has been shifting away from traditional PCs to advanced mobile phones and sophisticated online services delivered from remote data centers. Apple’s iPhone and iPad are grabbing the attention of users and application developers And Google is using its profits from internet search to deliver strategic broadsides against Microsoft’s core software franchises.

[Related Post: Windows saves the day, but rest of Microsoft business mostly blah.]

In that way, the revival of the Windows business was less a victory for Microsoft than a necessity — strengthening the company’s position, but by no means assuring its long-term standing in emerging areas of technology.

“Apple has really tried to innovate,” not just in new devices but in its Mac operating system, said analyst Tim Bajarin, president of technology consulting firm Creative Strategies Inc. in Campbell, Calif.

Microsoft, he said, has been spending much of its time “evolving their core operating system to fundamentally fix the mistake of Vista and just try to keep their franchise strong.”

To be sure, that was no small feat. The first six months following Windows 7’s release stand in sharp contrast with the early days of Windows Vista, which was plagued by bugs and widespread incompatibilities with software and peripherals such as printers and devices.

Windows 7 is “very stable compared with Vista,” said Gary Lin, manager of the PC Doctor repair shop in Bellevue. He cited scattered problems with Windows 7 printer drivers, and said he still recommends sticking with the older Windows XP in some cases, but he generally described Windows 7 as an improvement.

The good reviews are prompting many users to upgrade to Windows 7 without buying new PCs. A study released March 29 by the Forrester Research firm found that about 43 percent of people who moved to Windows 7 in the fourth quarter of last year did so on their existing machines — almost as many who upgraded by buying new computers, which is normally the much more common practice among consumers.

Microsoft’s Brooks said Microsoft’s internal numbers, based on its own customer surveys, give Windows 7 the highest rating for satisfaction that the company has ever seen for one of its mass-market products.

The rebounding economy also helps. PC shipments rose more than 24 percent in the first quarter, to 79.1 million, from 63.7 million the first quarter last year, according to an April 14 report from the IDC technology research firm.

“With Windows 7 at least the inhibitor is out of the way, and there are actually some people who like it,” said longtime PC industry analyst Roger Kay, president of the Endpoint Technologies Associates research firm in Wayland, Mass., who also works as a consultant to Microsoft’s Windows division.

Prior to Windows 7’s Oct. 22 release, Kay said the Redmond company’s reputation was at stake with the new operating system. Six months later, he said this week that the company had succeeded in salvaging that reputation.

At the same time, he added, it had “a pretty wide target” to hit.

Brooks and others at Microsoft are quick to point out that the company’s momentum extends beyond its Windows franchise.

The company’s Bing search engine, still a small player in the market, has been gaining ground against Google, rising to 11.7 percent of the U.S. market in March, according to the comScore Networks research firm. That was up from 8.3 percent a year earlier.

The trend has been the opposite in mobile phones. Microsoft’s share of the worldwide smartphone market slipped to less than 9 percent in 2009, from 14 percent the year before, according to the Canalys research firm. At the same time, the company’s archrivals, Google and Apple, climbed to 5 and 15 percent of the worldwide smartphone market, respectively.

Microsoft in March debuted a new mobile phone initiative, dubbed Windows Phone 7, that attempts to simplify the lineup of related hardware and appeal to application developers by letting them use the company’s Silverlight interactive technology and other tools common to software development for PCs and browsers.

The first Windows 7 Phones will debut later this year — around the time that Google is slated release its Chrome OS PC operating system, making the search giant even more of a competitor to Microsoft on computers.