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Brad Brooks, Microsoft's vice president of Windows Vista Consumer Marketing, said that Apple is proving

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to be "a pretty noisy competitor".

"You know it. I know it. It's caused some impact," he said of the Get a Mac campaign.

But Microsoft plans to bite back.

"We're going to start countering it. They tell us it's the iWay or the highway. We think that's a sad message. Software out there is made to be compatible with your whole life," he said.

Microsoft is planning a multi-million dollar advertising campaign to counter the perception that Vista is not compatible with many applications and devices. Brooks said that 77,000 devices are now compatible with Vista, twice as many as when the OS launched in 2006. And Vista, he said is an investment, which will pay off in the future.

"When you make the investment into Windows Vista, it's going to pay it forward into the operating system we call Windows 7," he said.