When the new version of Internet Explorer (7, for those of you who're counting) came out I was a little underwhelmed. I'd been using Firefox for a while, and all the improvements IE7 boasted were things that Firefox had already got - like tabbed browsing and a phish detector.
But IE7 did at least deliver a better browsing experience for IE6 users.
Now Windows Vista has been launched. A whole new operating system.
According to Microsoft it has 'hundreds of new features'. To be honest I'm not sure if 'a new GUI' really counts. I know about ninety percent of us keep the GUI in default mode, but changing the style of the windows and the colour of the menu bars doesn't count for me as a hardcore new feature.
Security has been enhanced, apparently. But that's something Windows has needed to address for a good long time.
It does sound as if the new shell is an improvement. I think many of us have got sick of our computers telling us to file a picture into 'My Pictures' even though we'd rather save it in the same directory as the Powerpoint presentation for which it's intended. Microsoft has taken this on the chin. Vista will give new ways of organising files in 'stacks', better searching capabilities,
'shadow folders' which can be returned to any past point (similar to the multiple levels of undo in Photoshop, which are one of its best features).
And it also allows the user to add metadata. That's really important. You'll be able to tag your files as if they're blog entries. Within an enterprise, or a collaboration, that will make the job of running taxonomies much more critical - but also opens up the potential for much more efficient knowledge sharing.
Now I don't have enough knowledge on other OSs to say for sure whether that's a differentiator for Windows, or just Microsoft playing catch-up. But it's the file system that seems to me to be the real selling point for the new version.
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