Microsoft is taking on Adobe again in the standards arena. The last time Adobe and Microsoft faced off it was over font formats.

Microsoft’s progress with Vista has been closely followed by many journalists and technical pundits. It is behind schedule and has had a handful of features postponed or culled.

Microsoft has made several attempts to integrate Windows and the web, but the center of gravity for innovation and monetization keeps moving to the network.

Microsoft makes no secret about the fact that Windows Vista is gathering information. End users have little to say, and no real choice in the matter^.

Vista is creeping in that direction, with improved search functions and nicely built-in music and photo organizers — you can actually “tag” photos with keywords, which is very handy. Useful widgets like clocks and photo albums cluster happily at the edge of the screen like attentive waiters, happy to serve you. Vista is actually a better experience than XP ever was if you plan for it and build around it.

The driver issues were big in the beginning but I waited a full year to get it and then built around it. Vista is fast, stable, and runs great on a new higher performance machine. I am by no means a “techie”, but from the many problems encountered with Vista by a lot of folks, Vista’s beautiful complexity may not be the correct choice of software for many, but I am keeping it, and enjoying it.

Vista vs XP

Vista is nothing but XP with severe changes to the foundation (google vista networking deficiencies), a flashy(aka worthless) theme, and tiny features that took 3rd party developers a month to match and are all available on sourceforge.

The good part:

• Vista is fully rendered in 3D, instead of the 2D pixel mapping of previous OSes. Also, it is fully indexing the entire hard drive at all times, so that when you search, your results are instant (like Google Desktop).

The bad part:

• Vista is expected to demand twice the RAM usually purchased for Windows XP machines. With today’s RAM glut there is not expected to be a shortage.

Conclusion

Vista is different and Yes, it looks nicer.