The Age of Vista – does the ‘ow’ start now?

Alex Zaharov-Reutt
Monday, 22 January 2007 21:21

Your IT - Entertainment

There’s seven days to go until Vista is officially launched onto the world market. Will the wow start now, or later, for most consumers, or will the wow actually be 'ow'?

It’s legion that the biggest competitor Microsoft faces with new versions of anything isn’t competing operating systems like Mac OS X or Linux, or competitors to Office such as OpenOffice or Google Docs and Spreadsheets, but older versions of existing Microsoft software.

While previous versions of Microsoft’s OS were generally seen as important upgrades (despite some users still yet to switch to Windows XP, stuck in a world of Windows 2000 or Windows 98), Microsoft’s Office software suite seemed to change less and less as time went on, despite major improvements under the sheets to make Office play better in the enterprise space.

And inertia from wanting to pay upgrade fees to get an improved version of existing functionality delayed upgrades until they were absolutely necessary. After all, the last time I remember people really lining up at midnight to buy Microsoft software was for Windows 95, and to a lesser extent, Windows XP, with the hard-to-get just launched Xbox 360 another candidate for midnight madness honours.

Now comes Vista and Office 2007, with Microsoft trying to drum up the excitement as in times gone by, to get people to go out and buy buy buy to experience the latest and greatest operating system and office suite Microsoft has ever produced.

While there will be stores open at midnight, ready to sell the first copies of Windows Vista, some in the ‘Ultimate Edition’ class marked as ‘Limited Signature Edition’ copies bearing the signature of Bill Gates, the general consensus is that the world won’t rush out to immediately upgrade just because Microsoft has made an upgrade available.

To start with, many of the touted features, such as better security, instant desktop search and the sidebar gadgets feature, are already available from third party software providers on Windows XP. A host of 2007 edition ‘Internet Security’ packages exist with powerful firewall, anti-virus, anti-spyware and other protective features, desktop search software is readily available from Google, Yahoo, Microsoft and others, and sidebars and gadget clones exist from Google, Yahoo and others already.

Other features include quality photo management, better backup and defrag tools, and even parental controls. All of these tools are available elsewhere, with both paid and free software packages available in most categories.

What Vista does is to bring all of these developments together in one operating system, delivering most of the advances in operating system conveniences people have been downloading and adding on to Windows XP, and for the most part, doing it all surprisingly well.

What else can we expect in Vista? Read onto page 2 to find out...