Windows Vista launch
Windows Vista and Microsoft Office 2007 launched on Tuesday morning, providing computer giant Microsoft with a much-needed revamp for two product lines accounting for a majority of the company's revenue. Windows Vista is Microsoft's first consumer operating system release since Windows XP in October 2001, and the 5 year gap was definitely noticeable to customers increasingly moving everyday tasks away from the desktop operating system and into hosted applications such as Yahoo! Mail or Google Calendar.
Both Vista and Office boast major improvements over their predecessors, taking advantage of the computing and graphics power found in today's machines and creating a better connected experience over the local network as well as the worldwide web. Vista features major overhauls to networking, sound, and graphics devices and drivers, some of the essential components of any desktop platform. Windows Presentation Foundation delivers a whole new interaction layer for content and interactivity, making applications written for past Windows OSs appear even more dated.
Office 2007 received a major overhaul, replacing the familiar drop-down menu bar with graphical representations of the same tasks in what Microsoft is calling its "Ribbon UI." The new office productivity software will make your colleagues feel like dinosaurs based on new document outlining tools and fancy graphs alone.
All these changes come at a price of course, and software buyers will need to decide which of the 12 or more versions of Vista or Office best suites their need. Vista users can choose between Home Basic, Home Premium, Ultimate, or Business editions of the software available in full, upgrade, or OEM varieties ranging from $100 to $400.
Are all of these new features exciting reasons to upgrade? Will consumers and businesses upgrade their operating systems or wait until buying a computer pre-loaded with the new OS? Will desktop gadgets and Internet Explorer 7 change the bridge between the desktop and our online lives? Has Om given up his MacBook Pro for a younger and sexier Windows laptop?
We answer these questions and more in this week's PodSession, Windows Vista launch. The podcast is 26 minutes in length, a 12 MB download.