Programming Windows: Connected, Clear, Confident (Premium)

I was on vacation with my family in Stowe, Vermont in July 2005 when I received a phone call from Microsoft PR after having ignored a briefing request. “You’re going to want to hear this one,” I was told. And so I lifted myself out of the pool-side chaise lounge, closed the book I was reading, and told my wife and kids that I needed a few minutes to deal with a work call.

It was Windows product manager Greg Sullivan. Microsoft was prepping to announce the final name for the version of Windows that had been known only by its Longhorn codename for the past several years. So I accepted the call.

Microsoft, I was told, would market Longhorn as Windows Vista.

“Windows Vista will bring clarity to your world by letting you focus on what matters most to you,” Sullivan told me. “We live in an age of more. We have more data, more music, more content than ever before. Windows Vista will help you get the clarity you need to get your work done quickly, so you can get off the computer and spend time with your family.” This message would appeal to all 600+ million Windows customers, Sullivan added because we all have things we want to accomplish and goals we strive toward.

Ugh.

As fate would have it, I had already leaked the Vista branding the previous day via my Internet Nexus blog, noting that the term meant, “a view, especially a splendid view from a high position,” or “a possible future action or event that you can imagine.” So it seemed fitting enough. But now I can reveal that a source had sent me leaked internal documents that would be presented at an internal Microsoft event called Microsoft Global Briefing (MGB) that was being held July 22 in Atlanta. At that event, Brian Valentine would officially announce the new name.

“Yesterday, at the Microsoft Global Briefing in the Georgia Dome, we reached a significant milestone,” Microsoft senior vice president Will Poole told employees. “We unveiled the name of our next client operating system, Windows Vista. We also announced that Beta 1, targeted at developers and IT professionals, will be made externally available by August 3rd … With Beta 1, we will start to give the world their first glimpse of our product, with most end-user features coming in Beta 2. We are on track to deliver Windows Vista in 2006.”

“I love this name,” said Jim Allchin, who had given final approval of the new moniker. “Vista creates the right imagery for the new product capabilities and inspires the imagination with all the possibilities of what can be done with Windows, making people’s passions come alive.”

I wasn’t completely sold on the name—I thought the company should have gone with Windows 2007 or whatever—but I figured we’d get used to it, as we had with Intel’s Pentium branding. What I had a harder time with was Microsoft’s weird “Connected, Clear, Confident” marketing.

“As always, Microsoft needs to summarize any product using three simple points, and with Windows Vista, those three points are ‘connected,’ ‘clear,’ and ‘confident’,” I wrote at that time, explaining each like so:

Connected. Windows Vista will seamlessly connect you with the people, information, and devices you need to interact with, quickly and in a really straightforward way. No computer sits alone anymore, according to the company, and you’re connected to the Web, and to devices, you want to contact people and to share things.

Clear. This refers both to the clarity of the user interface, which now sports a glass-like sheen that is, appropriately enough, called Aero Glass, and to the ways in which Windows Vista lets you more clearly access your own information. Instead of making you adapt to the way the computer structures data, Window Vista is far more dynamic, and far more personal. “Windows Vista introduces clear ways to organize and use your information to focus on what matters to you,” Sullivan told me.

Confidence. Thanks to spyware and other electronic threats, people don’t trust their computers anymore. Windows Vista will give people more confidence in their PC and their ability to get more out of it. Microsoft tells me it’s going to “take care of things” and make things more discoverable in Windows Vista. “It enables a new level of confidence in the security and reliability of your PC and in your ability to get the most out of it,” Sullivan told me.

Microsoft delivered Windows Vista Beta 1 on July 27, 2005, and as noted earlier, it was vastly improved when compared to the horrific WinHEC 2005 interim build from just three months earlier. But by this point, a lot of the excitement from the early days of Longhorn had been sucked out of the product.

“Beta 1 is all about possibility and promises, and that’s OK,” I wrote at the time. “My only real disappointment is that it took so long to get to this point: I first saw many of these features almost two years ago and now I want more.”

At Microsoft’s annual Financial Analysts Meeting the next day, Will Poole touted the financial performance of Windows, which had generated a record $12.2 billion in revenues over the past year, up 6 percent year-over-year. And he disclosed that Windows XP Service Pack 2 (SP2) had been downloaded over 218 million times since its initial release the previous August. But the challenge, he said, was finding a way to continue the growth.

“We have an ‘it’s good enough’ problem,” he said, “and it’s one that we’re going to continue to work to overcome, simply recognizing that customers are frequently judging the value of Microsoft software by code in Windows that was written between five and 10 years ago, and they’re finding that the software that they have right now works for them. They need to be convinced of why they should buy more. With Windows Vista, we’re working to show people that past is not, in fact, good enough.”

He then brought out Shanen Boettcher to provide a demo of Windows Vista, “to make it real.”

“Frankly, the majority of the features that end-users see are not in Beta 1,” he explained. “They will come in Beta 2, which is when we really will engage broadly with end-users. In between now and then, we’re going to have another milestone, which is our Professional Developers Conference, when we’ll really be engaging deeply with both the corporate as well as the commercial software development community, and getting them going with all the platform elements. Our plan that we’ve been public with for quite some time, that we are quite committed to, is to ship in time for H2 availability in 2006. We are moving fast with Windows Vista, and we’re very, very excited to have the beta out.”

In early August, I reported that the Sidebar was coming back to Windows Vista, and that Microsoft had been testing a new version of this technology in post-Beta 1 (e.g. 5200-series) builds. “It’s not on by default, and is surprisingly similar to the Dashboard feature in Mac OS X Tiger, according to my sources,” I wrote. “But it’s in there. And that’s all that counts.”

In late August, a source leaked the latest Windows Vista schedule, revealing that Microsoft was hoping to partially make up for all the Longhorn delays and ship Vista Beta 2 early, in late 2005.

“Vista Beta 2 is scheduled to be ‘feature complete’ by September 29, 2005,” I wrote. “Then, Vista Beta 2 will enter lockdown mode between October and November 9, 2005. After that date, Beta 2 will be in escrow. Microsoft now plans to ship Windows Vista Beta 2 on December 7, 2005, about three weeks later than the last schedule I obtained.” After that, “Microsoft will ship Windows Vista Release Candidate 0 (RC0) on April 19, 2006, and Windows Vista RC1 on June 28, 2006. Microsoft currently plans to release Windows Vista to manufacturing on August 9, 2006, and make the product broadly available by November 15, 2006.”

In September, I expanded on my earlier report that Windows Vista would feature multiple SKUs, or product editions when I received more internal documentation on this topic. The “uber” edition was now called Ultimate Edition. Consumer versions would be split between Starter, Home Basic, and Home Premium SKUs. And on the business side, we’d see Professional, Small Business, and Enterprise SKUs. This was much closer to what Microsoft would eventually ship, the Small Business edition would never appear.

What was interesting about this breakdown was that the Media Center and Tablet PC Edition versions were disappearing. Media Center and Tablet PC functionality would appear in Home Premium edition, the leak told me. And Tablet PC functionality would be made available across the business SKUs. The goal of the product edition differentiations in Windows Vista was to provide a “clear value proposition” to all customer segments and take XP-era innovations, such as the Media Center and Tablet PC functionality, mainstream.

And then it was time for the Professional Developers Conference (PDC), the long-awaited follow-up to the blockbuster PDC 2003 event, which was held in mid-September 2005.

Bill Gates began his PDC 2005 keynote by reminding the audience that this wasn’t an event that Microsoft held every year, heading off any questions about what had taken so long since PDC 2003. “It’s an event that we give when we have new tools, new foundation software, and new developer opportunities for you,” he said.

After framing the successes of the past and the trends that he saw for the near future, Gates then turned to Windows Vista, which Microsoft would make available to show attendees in the form of a Community Technology Preview, or CTP, an interim build between Beta 1 and Beta 2. Despite it having been recently demoted, Gates was still bullish on WinFS, noting that this storage platform would bring together work Microsoft had done previously and separately in SQL Server, server file systems, and client file systems.

“Windows Vista, a lot in this product,” he said. “We’ve tried to organize the new benefits under three headings: confidence, clear, and connected. A lot of it has to do with IT departments that want easy management, good event logging. A lot of it has to do with security. Investments we’ve made making it easy to monitor, troubleshoot, and avoid the kind of security problems that people have had. Vista is a very broad product in terms of its richness. And there’s no doubt that as we are putting that out there, all the new PCs will have Vista, and several hundred million existing PCs will be upgraded to get into that environment.”

Gates then introduced Office 12, which would feature a results-oriented interface that will be the subject of a future article in this series. Among other things, Microsoft was working to integrate XML even further into Office, in this case with new open document formats that were based on XML. Office 12 would be released “in the same timeframe as Windows Vista. And so what we’re going to see in the marketplace is two major releases that are very synergistic.”

Gates then introduced Microsoft corporate vice president Chris Capossela to demonstrate key Vista and Office 12 features, in effect assuming the role that Hillel Cooperman had provided in Gates’ PDC 2003 keynote. Like Cooperman, Capossela—who would later go on to become Microsoft’s Chief Marketing Officer (CMO)—was more of an everyman than an engineer, and his airy, casual manner provided a nice contrast to Gates and his stiffer, nasally style. And it is perhaps notable that he was onstage more than Gates himself.

Capossela first took the audience through a whirlwind tour of new Windows Vista “clarity” features that included taskbar previews, a new name and UI for Windows Flip (previously ALT + TAB), a new Windows Flip 3D (then WINKEY + SPACE but later WINKEY + TAB), desktop quick search, new Explorer icon thumbnails, virtual folders with filtering and metadata, the new Sidebar with real-time data in gadgets, and a SideShow feature that would bring secondary displays to the outside lids of laptops. It made sense in that pre-smartphone era, but it never made its way to production.

“We’re working very closely with our hardware partners to support SideShow,” he said, holding out a prototype. “This is just a laptop that’s got an auxiliary display built right in, with a couple of hardware buttons here that I can click on. And it’s running some mini-applications, or gadgets. This connects me to my information when I’m actually away from my desk. So, when I’m on the road, I can get quick access to my calendar, to perhaps my e-mail, and Expedia. I’m going to drill into this gadget, and you can see that I can get information about my flight to the PDC. So, you can imagine me getting out of a taxicab on the way into the airport, and just making sure I have that flight information, that flight number, right there. Some of these gadgets run when the PC is turned off, such as that Expedia one, and the Inbox or Calendar, and some of them require the PC to still be powered on, such as controlling your music.”

From there, Capossela moved into “confidence” features such as parental controls that would work with the new Games Explorer, and Internet Explorer features like anti-phishing and security reports. And then “connected feature,” mostly from IE as well, like tabbed browsing, quick tabs with thumbnails, improved printing capabilities, and RSS support. He then launched into an extensive peek at the new Office 12 user interface without once mentioning the word “ribbon.” (Again, we will explore that topic later.)

Once Capossela was done, Gates returned briefly to the stage to summarize “the next wave” of Microsoft software releases that would come in the following year.

“It is a big wave, it’s about software meeting the more advanced needs of users, it really lets us talk about the dream that some people think of in terms of that early ’90s hype that would happen overnight,” he concluded. “These are some of those same dreams, but now reframed in a way that they’re a reality, that the software foundation that was necessary for e-commerce and e-government at the ultimate level, the foundation pieces have been laid, with years and years and billions and billions of dollars of R&D; investment, and standards that have emerged throughout the industry, now we have that capability. And so we’ll have the big wave out in 2006 and then the software applications will get better and better.”

Gates didn’t make much of an impact at PDC 2005, though the Capossela demos were solid and well-presented. But when Jim Allchin stepped out on stage for his own presentation, it was clear something was wrong. This talk could not have been more different than his well-received 2003 outing.

Where the Allchin of two years previous had been confident, plain-spoken, and even humorous, the Allchin of 2005 was awkward, uncertain, and palpably nervous. He flubbed his lines multiple times, advanced slides too quickly, and opened with a defensive demonstration of how far the PC had come since its inception, a move clearly aimed at critics of him and his oft-delayed product.

Addressing Apple’s criticisms of Longhorn directly, he also pointedly mentioned that Microsoft had accomplished a lot since the last PDC two years earlier. “Since then, we’ve released two versions of the [XP] Media Center, two versions of [XP] Tablet [PC Edition], we’ve released the 64-bit [XP] client, 64-bit servers, new versions of the server, a massive update of Windows XP SP 2 for our customers, and we’ve shipped Windows Vista Beta 1,” he said.

Allchin was right to address Apple’s bogus comparisons. But it has hard not to feel bad for the man who had had so much riding on Longhorn. He bore so much of the blame, but he was also forced to carry the burden of seeing Longhorn—sorry, Windows Vista—through to its completion.

“Now, you can think of Vista as the culmination of the last 20 years,” he said. “Or you can be like me and think of it as the beginning of the next 20 years.” And then he laid out the course of his talk, which would eschew “flashy demos” and get “a little bit dirtier” over two hours as he described the new Windows developer platform, did another “lap” (this time around the Windows Vista Platform), provided examples of Windows Vista applications, and further explained the developer opportunity.

Given how well Allchin’s talk had gone at PDC 2003, hopes were high that Allchin could pull it all together. Instead, it was a slog.

After reiterating that Microsoft would give PDC attendees an interim Vista build, 5129, at the show, Allchin launched into an explanation of how the personal computing world had changed in those two years. Smartphones were becoming more powerful. Peer-to-peer content sharing was exploding. Subscriptions would be the key to getting the content you needed, he said. And he spoke of something called “the edge,” the places on the Internet were users would consume that content, and how it needed to be served by rich user interfaces that were not possible on the web alone.

“We’re unique because we have an end-to-end approach to this,” he said. “All the [Longhorn/Vista technical] pillars [Avalon, Indigo, and WinFS] work together. Other companies may have great solutions in one pillar, but you’re forced to glue together another pillar perhaps from another company. You might have a flashy presentation system from one company, but you have to get a data layer from another. In Vista, we’ve got one model, one common architecture, with components to manage presentations, data, and communications all built on a safe and reliable foundation.”

He then launched into a discussion of the Vista platform, its base services, and those four pillars. And he spent more time in this show than in the last describing the investments that Microsoft had made in the base services, adding functionality related to deployment, servicing, and Network Access Protection (NAP), a quarantining technology that would let corporations update PCs returned to the home network after time away to ensure they were up-to-date.

Microsoft was reducing reboots, he said to applause, and adding transacted storage across the registry and the file system. It was adding a feature called User Account Control (UAC)—which Apple would also mock despite already having a similar feature in Mac OS X—that would force administrator accounts to work normally as a standard user until an elevated task required an authentication prompt. That received multiple rounds of applause, though UAC was later the source of much controversy. He also demonstrated a feature called SuperFetch, which would improve the performance of Vista PCs and let them use a USB memory stick as encrypted virtual memory.

(In a weird and unrelated segue, Allchin then introduced a project, codenamed Atlas, that would let developers use ASP .NET to create web apps that targeted AJAX, or Asynchronous JavaScript and XML. Atlas would go on to be named the AJAX extension to ASP.NET 2.0. But it had nothing to do with Vista.)

On the Vista pillars front, the WinFX (Windows Framework) name was still in use, but Avalon had been renamed to Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) and Indigo had been renamed to Windows Communication Foundation (WCF), and both had been backported to Windows XP and Windows Server 2003. As Allchin correctly noted, WPF was “light years ahead of everybody in this space,” and in some ways, that’s still true 15 years later.

But Allchin also introduced a subset of WPF, then called Windows Presentation Foundation Everywhere (WPF/E), that would bring the WPF “tooling” to JavaScript so that developers could create web apps using XAML. The idea here was that developers could (hopefully) easily port rich WPF apps to the web and provide similar user experiences on different clients.

Historical sidenote: WPF/E would go on to become a technology called Silverlight. And it would play a very important role in the future, and so we will be looking at this more closely soon.

Moving to the data pillar, Allchin reminded the audience that Microsoft had removed WinFS from Vista and would ship it at a later date because of feedback from developers.

“Our conclusion is that a single [data] store isn’t enough, and that many stores are going to be the reality,” Allchin said. “We know that WinFS has innovations that no other store has or will have, but we also know that you need both the access to and updating capability to multiple stores. We are approaching this by addressing the impedance mismatch between the programming languages and the data. We also conclude that subscriptions are fundamental, along with sharing.”

To address these problems, Allchin offered a variety of solutions.

First, Vista would still include integrated search that would work locally, across a network, or over the Internet. It would offer integrated RSS subscription and management capabilities. And Microsoft had created an interesting technology called LINQ, the Language Integrated Query, that would allow developers to directly access SQL operations from .NET languages like C# and Visual Basic. This way, developers would not also need to learn Transact-SQL, the underlying language used by SQL Server, or however the latest data access APIs worked. And the firm would, of course, continue work on WinFS.

Moving quickly onto the communications pillar, Allchin described WCF as “a unified communications platform for writing distributed apps.” But based on feedback, WCF had evolved to be simpler and offer broader compatibility with communications standards. “Last PDC we were talking about WS-* [“WS star,” a broad set of web service messaging protocols] only, now we’ve integrated REST/POX, and MSMQ [Microsoft Message Queuing].” Microsoft had also integrated peer-to-peer capabilities into the system, and it created a new federated identification (ID) model called InfoCard.

InfoCard was a standards-based abstraction layer that would work with multiple ID providers, making it much easier for developers to write apps that required authentication. Allchin explained the technology using a real-world example: you’re in a coffee shop and want to share data with another person who is from a different company with no shared infrastructure. Using a new “Windows collaboration experience” called People Near Me that would be built into Windows Vista, you could share content using peer-to-peer technologies and InfoCard authentication.

After a demo of that feature, Allchin said that he would replicate the live coding experience from PDC 2003 and bring out “four architects”—Don Box, Anders Hejlsberg, Scott Guthrie, and Chris Anderson–for a “40-minute walk through each of the pillars.”

It was, unfortunately, nothing like the previous live coding experience.

It started well enough with Anders Hejlsberg, who demonstrated how easy it was to access data from C#, the language he had created, using LINQ.

But the banter between Hejlsberg and Don Box, who was writing code as Hejlsberg explained it, seemed a bit forced. The technology, at least, was solid, and Hejlsberg’s grasp of it was, as always, confident and commanding.

Next, Chris Anderson came out and he and Box proceeded to eviscerate all of the fun memories from their time on stage two years earlier. Their repartee during a WCF coding demo was humorless, as Anderson’s attempts at levity went largely ignored and Box continued to refer to the technology as Indigo.

Then, ASP creator Scott Guthrie came out to demonstrate ASP .NET and Atlas. ASP .NET, Atlas, and AJAX are web-focused server-based technologies, so we won’t spend much time on them here. But then Anderson returned to the stage so that he and Box could create a rich “Avalon” app—Box continued ignoring the real product names—and here, again, it was nothing like 2003.

For starters, the two used Visual Studio and its built-in project templates instead of writing the code from scratch using a plain text editor and command-line tools. That was understandable, given that most real developers would have that experience, but it removed some of the folksy elements from the previous show. Worse, not all of the code they used was written live on stage: this demo included huge swaths of pre-canned code, written in advance. And while it’s fair to say that what they created was more sophisticated, the experience was also not as fun.

With that painful bit out of the way, Allchin carted out Hillel Cooperman, who had wowed the PDC 2003 keynote crowd with a demonstration of a Longhorn user interface that, in 2005, we all finally understood would never happen. And here, again, it just wasn’t the same.

Cooperman showed off a sample app that his team had written to take advantage of the power of WPF and WCF. Dubbed Project Max, the app displayed a photo library using impressive visualizations and share photos with others. It was 100 percent managed code, he said, the UI was built using WPF, and it used Vista’s RSS capabilities to display recent articles from the team’s blog. It could share photos between two Vista PCs using WCF.

It was, in other words, a typical Microsoft demo from that era: a mishmash of multiple, unrelated features plastered together in an almost preposterous fashion. Worse, the WCF bit also clearly failed, and was replaced on-screen by a video representation of what should have happened. A 3D image view got some applause, but it was an ignoble follow-up for one of the heroes of PDC 2003.

To end this travesty, Allchin then brought out a marketing vice president from The North Face, a clothing company, to show off “a real app.” But this real app was apparently just a proof-of-concept app written in C# and XAML that the firm had written in “just six weeks.” It had some impressive but impractical visuals. Allchin felt that it would so impress other companies that they would “demand” similar capabilities for their own apps.

“This is going to be an amazing release,” he said of Windows Vista. “It hasn’t been since 1995 and Windows 95 that we’ve produced an operating system that had features for every audience. In the IT pro space, think about all the work that we’re doing in servicing and deployment, and security. For the information worker, think of all the search and organization and visualization, or even the simple meeting app experience that we’re going to put in the system; consumers, all the games that are going to be there, the photos, the music, the video, all that. And it hasn’t been since Windows 95 that we’ve had this rich an API for you.”

The opportunities presented by Windows Vista were vast, he said. There would be over 475 million new PCs shipped in the first two years of Vista’s availability, he claimed, and 200 million existing PCs that would be upgradeable. Plus, the enterprise was overdue for an upgrade cycle, he said, and with Vista and Office 12 coming out at about the same time, it all seemed like a no-brainer. Microsoft would invest hundreds of millions of dollars promoting “the magic of what we think of as Windows Vista and all the associated tools around it.”

“We think we’ve got the right platform,” he said. “Now, you need to take it and build on it.”

As for the new build, or what Microsoft called the September Community Technology Preview (CTP) Release, it was as promised an interim improvement over Beta 1 with several new features, but it was also a bit rough around the edges. It featured all the changes Capossela had demonstrated and discussed, and the taskbar was now transparent, instead of opaque black, and was more elegant looking. There were new apps, like Windows Calendar and Windows Backup. And best of all, to me at least, Microsoft had confirmed my SKU reports: there would be a Windows Vista Ultimate Edition. Microsoft was also promising to deliver future CTPs on a monthly basis.

And then a mini-miracle happened: less than a month later, Microsoft delivered on that promise by releasing the Windows Vista October CTP. And it even included several new features, such as a fully functioning version of Windows Media Player 11, the Vista version of Media Center, Network Center, Windows Digital Gallery, Mobility Center, built-in antispyware functionality, a less aggressive User Account Protection (UAP), and more.

Microsoft would skip a CTP build in November, but build 5259 leaked, giving enthusiasts something new to play with. And the company had bigger problems: I reported that the Windows Vista schedule had slipped based on yet another internal leak. And I later discovered that build 5259 had been the candidate for the November CTP, but that internal testing had scuttled those plans.

“Sources at the company told me this week that Microsoft will soon delay the release of Windows Vista Beta 2 from December 7, 2005 to sometime in January or February 2006,” I wrote. “However, because the Vista development schedule is extremely time-constrained, the company will try and make up lost time by eliminating one of the planned release candidate (RC) milestones that were planned for later in the process.”

“We are on schedule and committed to shipping on time and ensuring a high-quality product,” Microsoft responded. “Microsoft sets internal targets for the development team around milestones, but these are not commitments to specific dates. We do not comment on these internal milestones, and we have not announced a specific timeframe for our next major Windows Vista milestone.”

As expected, Microsoft didn’t deliver Vista Beta 2 as it had originally hoped. But it did release a new CTP, build 5270 and, go figure, a new schedule: in a briefing, Microsoft told me it would ship a feature-complete Vista version internally by the end of the month, and a feature-complete CTP by January or February 2006. Vista Beta 2 was still up in the air, I was told, but it expected to ship near-monthly builds of Windows Vista throughout 2006.

Windows Vista build 5270 was a nice set of improvements—“a holiday present,” Microsoft communicated internally—with many new features. Setup had been simplified and sped up. Windows Antispyware had been renamed to Windows Defender, which not only continues to this day but is one of Microsoft’s most successful brands.

Full-volume encryption was renamed to BitLocker Drive Encryption. There were new power management features like “single-button on and off” and “Fast off.” The Aero user interface was expanded to include smoother transitions between windows and a redesigned Start menu. Even the Start button, now an orb, was new.

Intriguingly, there were now two main user interfaces, Aero Glass and Aero Basic, along with a backward compatibility Classic mode, which resembled Windows 2000. Aero Glass provided translucent, rounded windows as well as a number of animations and was designed to be professional-looking and visually arresting. Aero Basic retained the style of Aero Glass, but with none of the translucencies and animations, and thus resembles a grayed-out XP-style UI. There was also a new display scaling feature, a first for Windows.

It was a nice turnaround. “I think people are going to be surprised by how good the Windows Vista December 2005 Community Technical Preview (CTP, or build 5270) really is,” I wrote. “Honestly, it’s been a long time since I’ve felt this good about Windows Vista.”

“All I can say is … wow,” Allchin told the Windows client team. “This product is going to blow people away … I am sitting here listening to Clapton, managing 4,000 photos, browsing the Internet, doing email, using search, playing with sync between PCs, etc. — all at the same time.  The [out of box experience] was cool (even with all its current issues). And on and on. The Windows team is back  — and it’s smokin’!”

Windows Vista, finally, was heading towards the finish line.