Microsoft should have been basking in glory this fall. Windows 7, designed to fix all or most of the ills of Vista, has received lots of raves even before its debut. And that’s forgetting the possibility, a strong one in my opinion, that some of those stories exhibiting over-the-top enthusiasm were bought and paid for by Microsoft.

Regardless, all those reviews and those new ad spots showing how warm and fuzzy Windows 7 is for six-year-olds, should have been sufficient to guarantee a huge and positive reception for the new operating system. That is, until the bottom fell out, resulting from a totally unexpected catastrophe.

You see, the Sidekick failure clearly demonstrates that something is seriously wrong with Microsoft. Despite the fact that the Sidekick depends fully on the cloud for managing your contacts, photos and other stuff, they evidently didn’t keep their part of the bargain to provide competent support when they spent some $500 million to acquire that company’s inventor, Danger.

More and more reports are coming to light that key personnel from Danger have either left the company, or been redeployed to another department, such as Microsoft’s nascent Pink mobile phone project. Support staff has been severely reduced. To add insult to injury, former Danger CEO Andy Rubin actually left Microsoft to become lead developer for Google’s Android platform. If you can’t keep the key executives of a company on board, how will the newly-minted Microsoft employees left behind feel about the situation?

Now gutting Danger’s infrastructure support staff may seem sensible from the standpoint of corporate bean counters who haven’t a clue about what’s necessary to manage a complicated server network with the appropriate level of redundancy, but it comes across as a “customer be damned” decision.

Meanwhile, I expect lots of Sidekick owners will be dropping that accursed smartphone like a hot potato. Indeed, T-Mobile has reportedly halted sales of the Sidekick, which is small consolation for the million-plus customers who found themselves betrayed by this server failure. What’s more, there are already reports that customers are being allowed to dump their contracts and transition to a different smartphone platform.

Now amid the apologies, Microsoft won’t be able to make the excuse that they had no responsibility for Danger’s products and services, since they did acquire the company and its obligations. This massive failure raises some serious questions about the efficacy of Microsoft’s cloud-based initiatives.

You see, in trying to compete with Google, Microsoft is making Office available in the  cloud, joining their existing services that include email and calendaring. That’s all well and good if the system works, but the Sidekick fiasco casts serious doubt on such initiatives. Why should you entrust your stuff to an outfit that doesn’t care about you?

Now I realize that some of you might attribute the Sidekick disaster as more an indictment of cloud-based computing than the failure of any individual company. I suppose there’s merit in that point of view, since the technology is all quite new and the entire concept of cloud-based computing remains a work in progress, punctuated by occasional failures from other companies including Microsoft’s arch rival, Google.

At the same time, you can be sure that Amazon, Apple, Google and other companies with similar online services are busy shoring up their networks and doing what they can to reduce outages and make sure that nobody will ever lose a single file. That will take time, and I expect in a few years, such outages will be mostly history.

At the same time, the system will only function if the company behind the network cares about its customer and ensures the system is not just reliable, but has an adequate and well-trained staff on hand to keep the servers running and appropriately updated. Cutting personnel to save a few million dollars may make sense from the standpoint of your bottom line, but it doesn’t help if that reduces reliability, particularly when the inevitable failures do occur.

It’s a sure thing that the people who embraced the Sidekick may even now be kicking themselves for not abandoning the product when Microsoft took over. Worse, T-Mobile, despite a great reputation as a wireless carrier, is bound to lose customers and some of that hard-won reputation over this debacle.

Now for those of you who feel that Microsoft should be given a pass, let me ask you: How can you possibly rely on a company that charges excessive prices for its products, but doesn’t provide the reliability and security that you need? How can you depend on a company whose management, in the person of CEO Steve Ballmer, can’t utter a single sentence without coming across as unstable? How can you believe a company that simply can’t tell the truth, something that’s been demonstrated over and over again all these years?

In recent columns, I’ve suggested that Microsoft’s stockholders should be demanding a refund. That’s true for customers as well — and an avalanche of such demands may be the only way to demonstrate to Microsoft that they need to change their ways.

As most of you know, Microsoft hasn’t had very good luck lately in getting cell phone makers to adobe Windows Mobile. Indeed, recent surveys show that the BlackBerry software, Apple iPhone and even Google’s Android are faring far better these days.

The newly-released Windows Mobile 6.5 has gotten, to be generous, lukewarm reviews. Microsft’s response is, as usual, to promise everyone that they’ll do better next time with version 7, whose shipping date has now slipped to late 2010. That, of course, is nothing more than their typical excuse for releasing a product that would probably be declared unreleasable by most of their competition.

To add insult to injury, Microsoft has just pulled a fast one on the users of T-Mobile’s Sidekick smartphones. You see, Microsoft purchased the creator of that product, Danger, for a cool $500 million, but has evidently let development on the platform languish.

Worse, some Danger employees were promptly transferred to the still-vapor Pink project, supposedly a project to develop a genuine Microsoft mobile device in the worst tradition of the Zune digital media player. However, many key members of Danger’s staff have simply quit, and the resources allocated to the Sidekick have evidently been severely curtailed.

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It’s widely agreed that columnist Walt Mossberg of the Wall Street Journal is the “dean” of tech journalists. He’s been at it as long as anyone, and his reviews merit serious attention from almost every corner of the industry. He’s even among the few on Apple’s preferred lists of journalists to get an early look at their new products. That’s why Mossberg, David Pogue and a handful of others manage to get those stories out sometimes before the new Apple gear goes on sale.

When it comes to Mossberg, one of the reasons he’s earned special attention is the result of the calm, even-handed approach he takes in his reviews. It doesn’t hurt that he works for the most respected financial newspaper on the planet.

So you can expect that when he wrote his review of Windows 7, people took notice. When he said that Windows, at long last, comes especially close to the Mac OS in terms of performance, features and reliability, certainly you have to consider what he says seriously. It potentially means that Microsoft has largely vanquished many of the more serious problems that existed in Windows Vista, and that Apple’s Snow Leopard maybe isn’t quite as much of an improvement as it should be.

On the other hand, nobody is infallible. I’m acutely aware of my faults whenever I look at myself in the mirror or edit one of my writings or radio shows, so this imperfect writer will discuss an imperfect review. You see, I am extremely disappointed with the way Mossberg handled this particular piece, and it’s not because I’m a Mac user and consider Microsoft products mostly second rate.

When you look behind the conclusions and examine the facts, you wonder if Mossberg isn’t seriously understating his conclusions and the distinctions he found between the two operating systems. Consider the matter from the standpoint of Philip Elmer-DeWitt, a tech writer for Fortune, and you’ll see a surprisingly number of Windows 7 negatives.

In fact, Elmer-DeWitt summarizes a grand total of 16 of them, and they aren’t all trivial, so you have to wonder just what logic Mossberg is applying in waxing so positive about Windows 7.

One particularly irksome shortcoming is the totally irritating process of upgrading from Windows XP. It means that the millions and millions of people who passed Vista by, or downgraded to XP, are forced to wipe their hard drives and restore their data to install Windows 7. Worse, it’s not just reinstalling all your apps, but running all the updates that you’ve received since they were first purchased. There’s no direct route and even Microsoft’s so-called “Easy Transfer” wizard is only useful for your files, nothing else.

At least Tiger users can easily upgrade to Snow Leopard with no intermediary process to contend with. Indeed, this is such a serious defect for Windows 7 that you wonder why Microsoft couldn’t devise a more seamless process. Upgrading consumes several of Mossberg’s more prominent negatives, and they ought to be sufficient to remove at least a couple of ratings points from the final verdict, at least as far as I’m concerned.

Many of Mossberg’s other criticisms relate to the usual inconsistent interface elements and sometimes uncertain performance. Even worse, Microsoft now omits the basic apps that Apple provides with every new operating system installation, which provide such functions as email, calendaring, maintaining a contact list and playing video. In what most be one of the boneheaded moves of the decade, Microsoft expects you to download all this stuff after installing Windows 7. Maybe with their perverse logic, they believe they are giving Windows users the option of using someone else’s software, but that option would be there anyway. It makes no sense to omit such basics, since all it does is inconvenience most users.

On a lesser note, Mossberg also mentions issues with display and input device drivers. In the end, performance is better than Vista, but evidently only exceeds that of Snow Leopard on one of the computers on which Windows 7 was tested.

On the other hand, maybe this isn’t the first time Mossberg has been a little too enthusiastic about a Microsoft release. You see, as quoted in the Fortune article, he also raved in a similar fashion about Windows Vista back in 2007. In both reviews, he used the identical “best version of Windows” phrase, and that’s a conclusion that can hardly be applied to Vista, even then.

I suppose some of you might suggest Mossberg was simply paid off by Microsoft to give Windows a pass in both instances. However, no one of his standing could or would be expected to get away with pulling such a stunt. I’d rather believe that Mossberg was, in effect, emulating the late audio/video magazine reviewer, Julian Hirsch, by understating the product’s deficiencies and perhaps being a little too praiseworthy in his conclusions.

Unfortunately, Mossberg’s review is going to be regurgitated by Microsoft and its followers with the same enthusiasm as they did with Windows Vista — that is, until the bottom fell out!

Let’s be clear about this: AT&T may have been the best wireless carrier partner for the iPhone from a business standpoint, but any customer who has encountered a spate of dropped calls will tell you there ought to be a better way.

Now the story goes that Apple first brought the concept of the iPhone to Verizon Wireless. Typical of Apple, they wanted a higher level of control than any other cell phone maker would ever be granted, and Verizon said absolutely not. So they took their proposal to AT&T which, busy putting together the pieces after a big merger, was willing to compromise.

In retrospect, the deal was certainly positive for AT&T, since it gave them the sort of prestige that was previously lacking, but it also created a host of side-effects. Whether or not the problems were predictable is anyone’s guess, but I doubt even Apple was surprised to see the iPhone and the App Store take off so quickly.

The biggest problem for AT&T is very much part and parcel of the iPhone’s ultra-simple Internet capability. Surveys have demonstrated that a much higher percentage of iPhones and iPod touches are surfing the Web compared to any mobile competitor, smartphone or otherwise. What this means is that AT&T’s network is heavily saturated, causing slower performance and, worse, dropped calls. This problem is particularly prevalent in larger cities.

Despite AT&T’s ad campaign boasting it has the best 3G network, they have also begun to admit that they have lots of work to do. Whether expected or otherwise, they claim to be spending billions of dollars to expand networks, install new cell towers and so on and so forth.

But improvements of the sort required to smooth out the iPhone’s connection difficulties won’t come overnight. Even if they have all the ingredients in place for a shovel-ready cell phone tower construction project, local governments may cause them grief. The other day, in fact, I got a letter from AT&T explaining that they’d encountered opposition to building extra cell towers in my area, and wondered if customers would express their point of view to local officials.

Now I won’t get into the issues of zoning, complaints about unsightly obstructions and other objections to building a cell tower in a given neighborhood. I understand all that, but it seems that the existing towers around here are reasonably well concealed so as not to call attention to themselves. What’s more, the local populace needs to realize that, if they want better cell phone reception, they’ve got to allow the wireless carriers to expand their networks. You can’t have one without the other.

Before you think I’m just siding with AT&T, bear in mind that I don’t encounter the sort of connection issues customers in New York and California routinely face. Yes, there are neighborhoods in the Phoenix metro area where dropped calls might occur, but the same is true for all cell phone systems. Looking back over my experience with Verizon Wireless, I’ve driven through neighborhoods where their service had serious issues.

Yes, I wish AT&T was quicker to bat with MMS texting and I hope they will offer a tethering feature sooner rather than later. The latter, by the way, simply means being able to use your iPhone as a broadband modem with, say your Mac or PC. The delays may indeed have been the result of poor planning.

However, the grass isn’t always greener on other wireless networks. Even if Apple decided to expand their carrier lineup when the exclusive with AT&T expires — which is expected next year — that doesn’t mean they can build a Verizon version overnight. The technology is different; AT&T uses GSM and Verizon uses CDMA. Yes, other handset makers do offer different versions of their products to accommodate the various network protocols. Indeed, I’d really be surprised if Apple didn’t have a CDMA version of the iPhone in is development labs. But since both AT&T and Verizon are going to be migrating to a new system, LTE evolution, in the next few years, is it worth it for Apple to build products supporting a standard that’s being phased out?

Actually, I think it is, even if a CDMA iPhone is available for just a year or two. In that timeframe, Apple may be able to sell several million copies, which ought to be enough to cover the development costs of an alternate version.

On the long haul, I happen to believe that Apple will simply do in the U.S. what is already being done overseas, and that’s to sell the iPhone to multiple carriers. Let those companies compete with each other to move as much product as they can, while Apple laughs all the way to the bank.

Besides, if will also give you a choice, if you find your existing wireless carrier doesn’t deliver the customer service or network experience that you expect.