(Shameless Plug Department: A clip of me being interviewed by the Associated Press during the Windows 7 launch can be found here.)

The battle between Microsoft and Apple--or rather, the advertising back-and-forth in which both companies have been engaged for years--reached a new and fevered pitch during Windows 7's launch week.

Apple released a series of new ads that attempted to paint Microsoft's new operating system as a case of, "Meet the new boss, same as the old boss," to quote The Who. Apple's advertising campaigns have never exactly been passive when it comes to tearing down PCs, but these are particularly notable for the savagery with which they go after Windows 7.

(I do enjoy John Hodgman's brief impersonation of Don Johnson in the "Broken Promises" ad, but Justin Long has started to become so insufferable that you half-wish Bruce Willis would appear screen left and start whaling on him like he did in "Live Free or Die Hard.")

The new ad campaign, combined with Apple's targeted rollout of new hardware during the week-- including, as this eWEEK slide show shows, the all-in-one iMac, a revamped 13.3-inch MacBook and the 2.9-pound Mac Mini--is indicative of one goal: to take mind share away from Microsoft during what was arguably the biggest week in years for Redmond.

Did Apple succeed?

I don't think so.

Microsoft pretty handily dominated the tech news cycle over the last few days, as expected. Love it or hate it, Windows continues to run on around 90 percent of PCs worldwide, and that guarantees a substantial audience base when something seismic like a new version comes rolling around--particularly when that new version comes with a massive marketing campaign.

As someone pointed out to me the other day, the only way that Steve Jobs was going to upstage Microsoft this week would be if he took some of his millions and hosted a free U2 concert smack-dab in the middle of Times Square on Oct. 22.

Did Apple get some attention? Certainly. But this was Microsoft's week. Questions about market share and whether Windows 7 will succeed, those will only resolve themselves over the following months or years--and both companies will definitely have more chances to upstage each other in the future.