It's Here!

Six or seven years after inception, Microsoft's next-generation operating system Vista, aka Longhorn, finally arrived today. It offers the most secure operating system Microsoft has ever produced, copies all the recent innovations in the Macintosh's OS-X, and adds some new innovations such as the 3-dimensional windows shown.



Here's the story of one Mac user who switched to Vista, perhaps because Vista runs faster on a Mac than does OS-X?

The eye candy is fun, but the vast majority of work which has gone into Vista is to make it secure. That security is worth the price of admission. Beware, though, that it's a memory hog and you should probably have 2 gigs of memory on any system running Vista.


Lost in the noise, but probably more important in the long run, is the new Office 2007. I've personally been using it for six months and can confidently assert that, using .NET technology, it is far safer and stabler than any previous version of Office. Although many of the features in Vista were first found in OS-X, Office 2007 includes features which are truly revolutionary. And these new tools are useful. Office 2007 is a significant step forward as a productivity tool, as internal studies have found that any feature anywhere in the system can now be located in 10 seconds or less by unsophisticated users. Gone are the days when there were all sorts of things you could do in practice but didn't know about.