Vista evangelists are, well, luke warm

You know how trade shows are. A publishing company advertises the event, creates excess hype, gets a load of exhibitors to pay exhorbitant sums of money to attend, and then no delegates turn up. With the fallout from Y2K that scenario has become commonplace.

Which is why it was a pleasant surprise to see the technology for education trade show, BETT, absolutely thriving in London's Olympia last week. It doesn't calm the pulse rate, but at least it does provide some pretty good news stories for us wizened old hacks.

Microsoft, as one might expect, took advantage of this unusual liveliness, running a physically dominant display just inside the main entrance, promising everything which ran on Vista and Office 2007.

Given that Becta had just sucked Microsoft into its shotgun - and that makes a change judging by recent form - we journeyed over to the Microsoft metropolis to find how they were going to wriggle out from this apparent impending doom.

You'll see their comments in the news section of this here site, but alongside the hardcore news, I was offered an interview with two teachers who, it seemed, had procured Vista and Office 2K7 for their schools. "Come interview them, see what Vista/Office has done for them," cooed Microsoft.

Now bear in mind that these two teachers were carefully chosen from among a few hundred thousand education professionals in having some of the most positive stories to tell about Microsoft's products.

Imagine my surprise then, when they told me they hadn't even bought anything. They'd paid Microsoft nothing. Nichts. Nowt.

It turned out they'd both been given a free trial of the software and loved it. Yet still the purse strings hadn't been loosened enough to buy it.

What that says about a) school IT budgets or b) the appeal of Vista/Office, I'll leave up to readers to decide. But if these are the most positive schools in the country, then in my book Microsoft has a lot of ground to make up with its two new propositions.