Real killer features for Vista?

Alex Zaharov-Reutt
Thursday, 01 February 2007 15:33

Your IT - Entertainment

Despite reports that Vista is Microsoft’s last big operating system release, Steve Ballmer has said there it wasn’t the last. Paul Thurrott has reported in his recent Office 2007 review that much of the Office 2007’s Ribbon UI team have moved over to work on the next version of the Windows interface.

Now that Vista is out, the relevant teams at Microsoft can work on adding the features they left out on Vista’s replacement and taking Vista to the next user interface experience. Microsoft is collecting more information on hardware and software used with Windows than ever before thanks to its error reporting functionality. What’s the bet that we’ll see a ‘Vista 2’ in a couple of years, instead of four or five years, which Microsoft could conceivably call ‘Vista 360’ as they did with the Xbox?

But all that is for the future. Today, Vista is the new experience. The one killer feature of Vista is Vista itself. It brings so much that we regularly add to Windows XP into the operating system as standard, and for the most part, is woven together very well.

Most people that regularly use Windows XP or earlier versions will love the way Vista works and all the new features Vista offers if and when they start using Vista on a regular basis. Even at this early stage of more drivers being needed and some software still to get updates, Windows ‘just works’ more than ever before. A Windows of this caliber has definitely been too long in coming – finally it is here for anyone that wants it.

The only thing left for most people is to use it themselves to see what they think. Inevitably, many will ask themselves whether they need to upgrade right now if everything is more or less running fine.

Others will want to think about going to Mac OS X and being able to run Windows XP or Vista anyway, alongside Linux if desired. Others will choose to run Linux, whether on its own or as a multi-boot or virtualized system, running XP, Vista or other operating systems as desired. Others still will wait a few months to see how everything pans out.

The only thing that’s certain right now is that a new version of Windows has arrived at last. Where you want to go today from here is entirely up to you.