Now that Vista has been launched, just about everyone has heard about its new and improved Aero user interface, desktop search, security and various multimedia enhancements.
But there’s far more to Vista than the features consumers will experience when they use the OS. Five years in the making, Vista — an evolutionary move rather than a revolutionary one — has broad implications for Microsoft. Inside Vista are clues about the future of Windows, and how Microsoft plans to position its number-one core product in the future.
Vista represents a pivotal change for Microsoft for several reasons. For one, the company has been very public about how it changed its own internal development style to create Vista’s new architecture.
Because previous versions of Windows had so many interdependencies between different parts and layers of the OS, Microsoft tried to create Vista as a modular OS with fewer interdependencies, which will ultimately make it more stable, says Al Gillen, an analyst with research firm IDC.
|