The business version of Vista has just been released and is briefly reviewed in this article. Curiously titled ‘Windows Vista Ultimate’ even though no ‘Ultimate Extras’ have yet been revealed, while it’s miles better than RC1, I can’t help but feel this latest version is really just RC3.

Of course he meant the biggest launch in terms of the amount of money, time and effort that has gone into getting Vista to the stage it is today. But it still has bugs – I remember reading something along the lines that once Vista had less than 500 bugs, it was going to be ‘good to go’.

I can’t remember how many bugs there officially are in the Vista RTM, but one thing’s for sure: it’s not zero.

Even by January 30, when Steve Ballmer will be on stage again, this time really unveiling ‘his biggest launch’, as we will have the true consumer and business releases of Vista with whatever they’ve been able to fix and update between now and whatever the cut-off point is to get the consumer versions burning onto DVD in a legitimate CD/DVD manufacturing factory.

I can’t imagine that that process has already begun – it’s still only early in December and surely Microsoft still have some time up their sleeves before they get the boxed copies on the production line. And even so, there are likely to still be bugs in Vista. But with the world now able to receive automatic updates, I’m certainly hoping that whatever bugs still remain will be fixed, as will the future ‘bugs’ of security updates, patches and whatever else needs to be updated in Vista.

Of course, Microsoft already does this with its service packs, which roll up all of the updates – and more, as we saw with Windows XP SP2 – into a nice official service pack.

But companies like anti-virus vendors have finally seen the light, and no longer ask their customers to wait until the following year’s update to the software to get the new features. If there are new features, you’ll get them with the auto updates.

While an operating system is much more complicated that an Internet security package, Microsoft should continue fixing whatever needs fixing and roll out the updates in a manner that doesn’t cause chaos.

Given that they’ve said they will be updating Windows much more regularly, I’m expecting these regular updates to be more than critical security patches, but a continual updating of the software where necessary.

Of course Steve Ballmer did talk about the ‘next’ version of Windows, which will supposedly have some of the features (like the next generation WinFS file system) that was slated for inclusion in Vista. There’ll be even more integration with the online worlds of information and software as a service. And Microsoft say they will continue down the path of releasing major new OS versions in the future.

So with those observations out of the way, what is Vista RTM like from my perspective? Read on for more...