You know an Internet meme has made it when it makes its way into print; and you know it is fully crystallized when the New York Times deems it worthy of its august pages. Please welcome Microsoft's Mojave Experiment, its unique and unliked ad campaign, to that club.

The Times weighs in today, and unsurprisingly, it focuses not on the campaign's efficacy--and certainly not on Vista itself--but rather on the (overwhelmingly negative) blogger and Internet reaction to the campaign. The ploy is “a clever test that demonstrates nothing,” Advertising Age columnist Bob Garfield tells the paper.

The paper does give the pro-Mojave forces a chance to defend the campaign, with an officer at the branding firm that conducted the test calling it "a fair representation of the operating system."

Still, the article spends most of the time discussing the campaign, not Vista; and, where it does discuss Vista, it's mostly a rehashing of everyone's complaints.

It is getting ever-more difficult to argue that this is benefiting Microsoft and Vista. Pretty soon, the Mojave Experiment will likely be declared a failure.