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Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer
Microsoft rolls out its big guns

Microsoft is beaming after the official launch of Vista and Office 2007 to business customers. Microsoft is betting heavily on its two latest software releases and an estimated 90 million copies of Vista worldwide within the next year. The simultaneous launch of Vista and Office 2007 also marks the first time that Microsoft has launched two flagship applications together since Windows 95 and Office 95 over 10 years ago.

Microsoft notes that Windows 95 brought TCP/IP to the mainstream allowing for a huge surge in Internet activity while Windows XP made wireless networking and mobility prevalent throughout the computing industry. With Vista, Microsoft looks to push the boundaries of graphics technology and XML.

"These are game-changing products," said Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer. "It’s an incredible step forward for business computing in a year of unprecedented innovation from Microsoft. We expect that more than 200 million people will be using at least one of these products by the end of 2007."

According to Microsoft, its new software products are aimed to advance the industry in the following four areas:

  • Simplifying how people work together.
  • Finding information and improving business insight.
  • Helping protect and manage content.
  • Increasing security and helping reduce IT costs.

"During the last decade, Windows 95 and Office 95 transformed the way people work. These new products announced today are the most advanced work that Microsoft has ever done, and I believe they signal the beginning of a new wave of innovation that will have an even more profound impact during the next decade," said Ballmer.

You can go the following links to see pricing for Windows Vista and Office 2007. Both applications are due to reach retail customers on January 30, 2007.

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prediction
By msva124 on 12/1/06, Rating: 0
RE: prediction
By NordicNINE on 12/1/2006 9:20:40 PM , Rating: 2
We have a Volume License agreement at work and have the right to be able to install Vista & Office 2007 on all PC's.
I just downloaded both today, but haven't had a chance to install them.
I'd love to install Vista on all of them because of all the Group Policy improvements. We have some specialized software than nearly all of our PC's use and I'm sure that won't be Vista compatible for a while. We'll have to do alot of testing for a while before implementing it.
Alot of people may hate Microsoft, but they make their products very manageable in a domain setting.
You can install Vista now without alot of the eye candy.


RE: prediction
By gbed on 12/2/2006 8:11:21 PM , Rating: 2
NordicNINE, if your volume agreement includes SA (software assurance), then you will get Vista Enterprise instead of Vista Business. Vista Enterprise has 4 key features above Vista Business, one of those being 4 free virtual OS's, when Vista is the host OS. So, you can start up Virtual PC on the vista box, then have a WinXP Pro machine, a WinNT machine, a Win 2000Pro machine all running on that box. This is the first time that Microsoft has had a version exclusively for SA clients.

Enjoy Vista.


RE: prediction
By Bonrock on 12/1/2006 10:02:37 PM , Rating: 3
With all due respect, I think your predictions about what will happen with Windows Vista are completely wrong. I can't speak for businesses, but my experience with consumers (i.e. all of the friends who have seen various Vista betas running on my computer over the past year or so) is that they are very excited about Vista. Friends who thought of Windows as a boring, stodgy OS have looked at Vista and been very impressed. A friend of mine who switched to the Mac about a year ago told me that after seeing Vista in action, he's planning to upgrade his old PC so he can run Vista in addition to using his Mac.

Quite frankly, I think Vista is primed for major success--no matter how much all the Microsoft-bashers out there may wish for it to flop.


RE: prediction
By AlexWade on 12/1/2006 10:13:16 PM , Rating: 4
They be excited until word-of-mouth tells them how difficult Vista is to use. Every minute thing you get a message "Are you sure you want to do this?". Click yes. And if you click it again 2 seconds later, same box.

Want to be a FULL administrator so you can make these changes quickly? Sorry, you have to go through 100 hoops.

Want to easily configure your boot loader to accommodate other OS's? Sorry, you'll need to know new terms and read through 2 screens full of ambiguous data.

Looking for the run command? Sorry, it is turned off by default.

Vista has great potential, but right now it sucks. All it needs is to be less annoying and a lot easier to make system changes. Microsoft's biggest flaw with Vista is the botched Linux-type security feature. Users should be, by default, limited users, instead of annoyed root users like they are now. If you try to make a change, a nice box will pop up explaining you need to be an Administrator and explain why and then how to do it.

Microsoft is going to be gravely disappointed at how it sells. I am not buying a copy until at least SP1 or until these problems are fixed.


RE: prediction
By Locutus465 on 12/2/2006 2:14:01 AM , Rating: 2
Personally I'm excited to get Vista installed on my parents computer for the very reasons your putting it down for. Just 2 months ago my parents computer go some new cute email program installed on it and no one seemed to know how... With Vista/UAC I'm pretty sure we won't have mysterious installs again.


RE: prediction
By icab on 12/3/2006 11:37:38 AM , Rating: 2
I'm with you on the UAC and the way it runs. It's questions everything you do. (last one I used was beta 2, however) The dialog window is ridiculous! It has this long explanation of what it's trying to do and that you can't do it and that you have to be this or that, blah blah blah. UGLY User interface. On OS X, it's a simple dialog window that says something along this one sentence: "Blah" needs your administrator password to perform this operation." That's it. Simple.

Run cmd, however? The "average" windows user doesn't need a run command. If one needs it, he probably knows a little bit more about what he's doing and can, therefore, enable the run command.


RE: prediction
By msva124 on 12/1/2006 11:30:26 PM , Rating: 2
On second thought, you're right. Why don't we team up and abuse the moderation system to silence any negative criticism about Vista?


RE: prediction
By msva124 on 12/2/2006 1:07:22 PM , Rating: 2
Upon reading some more about Vista, I now know that there is an option to turn off eye candy and use the "Classic" interface. I'm an idiot, I'm an idiot, I'm an idiot. There.

Also I will be actually using Vista starting tomorrow, so hopefully I will be able to come up with some more informed reasons to bash it.


RE: prediction
By msva124 on 12/4/2006 7:27:40 AM , Rating: 2
Then I found something out. The video card in my Thinkpad T42, a fairly recent computer, does not support the Aero interface. And of the four computers in the house, the best video card is a GeForce 4 Ti 4200, which also is not supported by Aero. Why even bother if I'm not going to get the full Vista experience?

So I thought I would just try Office 2007. Alas, it "requires" Windows SP2, which I have not installed it on any of my computers. Much for the same reason as Vista, because it has nothing I need.

I guess the Vista revolution will be leaving me behind.


VISTA
By montgom on 12/1/2006 9:48:43 PM , Rating: 2
I have played with it for a few hours. 1GB RAM, AMD 3200+, ATI 9800 Pro

Vista has slowed this machine.

I look forward to finding out what makes it better than XP SP2. IE7 with tabbed browsers in XP has left me flat.

Bob




RE: VISTA
By Bonrock on 12/1/2006 10:13:01 PM , Rating: 2
I'm not sure how much slower your machine is running on Vista or what the cause is. However, I would suggest that you hold off on judgment until after Vista is officially released to consumers in January. From what I've seen, it looks like a lot of hardware companies are dragging their heels on releasing good drivers for Vista because they have another two months before widespread adoption. You may have better luck with newer drivers in that timeframe.


RE: VISTA
By montgom on 12/1/2006 10:45:03 PM , Rating: 2
I will wait until drivers arrive. I just used the ones on the DVD (9,000 drivers??). Some audo drivers were not installed.

Just my first impression. I assume, given time, it will chnage for the better.

I always get in trouble, but every OS that MS has released has always been better than the last. Hope I don't get flamed for that comment ;-)
Bob


RE: VISTA
By GreenEnvt on 12/2/2006 11:15:29 AM , Rating: 3
Windows ME was junk compared to Win98, no improvement there.
Other then that though, yes, each one has been an improvement.


RE: VISTA
By msva124 on 12/4/2006 7:30:26 AM , Rating: 2
What about the little known Windows 97?


RE: VISTA
By GreenEnvt on 12/1/2006 11:27:59 PM , Rating: 2
I'm on an Athlon X2 4200, 2gb ram, and ati x1800. Vista RTM seems just as speedy as XP to me.


Roll 'Em out!
By jodhas on 12/1/2006 4:23:46 PM , Rating: 2
Roll 'em out! We all have our own likes/ dislikes for Microsoft. But Vista and Office is a welcoming change.

With each new MS OS release, I felt that the Hardware market hasn't caught up quite yet to the level of the OS release. But with Vista's launch, I feel that the Hardware isn't the bottleneck anymore.

All in all, it is an interesting day.




RE: Roll 'Em out!
By ksherman on 12/1/2006 4:49:29 PM , Rating: 2
As an Office 2007 Beta user, I can honestly say that I have never been so excited to use Word than I have been using 2007. It really is quite amazing.

I also used Vista RC1 for about a month. While I am less impressed with Vista, it still brings with it significant improvement.

Kudos to Microsoft, as you remind us why we love computers so much :-)

Now if only they were Free ;-). Though I would settle if MS could have put Outlook 2007 in with the student edition of Office.


RE: Roll 'Em out!
By Fanon on 12/1/2006 4:56:57 PM , Rating: 2
Agreed. I wrote two books this year using Word 2007, and while I did experience a few bugs, I absolutely loved using the program to write. Microsoft did a wonderful job with Office 2007. Here's hoping that the bugs I submitted are fixed in the final version =)


RE: Roll 'Em out!
By jtesoro on 12/1/2006 9:19:48 PM , Rating: 2
Haven't tried Office 2007 Beta, and I'm very intrigued how people can rave about a word processor!

Here's hoping to the unlikely scenario that our company migrates to this version soon.


RE: Roll 'Em out!
By kelmon on 12/2/2006 5:54:21 AM , Rating: 2
I absolutely agree. I'm running both Vista RC2 and Office 2007 B2TR and can say that, while Vista does absolutely nothing for me, I am highly impressed with the new version of Office and will definitely be picking up a copy when it gets its full release next year. Frankly, I'm struggling to think of a more significant update to the Office series since I started using back in Windows 3.11. With Vista, however, XP already seems good enough that I can't see anything that makes we want to hand over the cash for it so I'll pass for the time-being.