So last Thursday was Windows Vista Launch Day … finally. But while Microsoft had its banners flying, some folks I know were more on the ho-hum scale. My buddy Paul Lindo, an IT consultant, was wondering if "it might just be Windows XP with a prettier face."

And it's true that Vista suffered several features "adjustments" as well as a lengthier-than-expected road to shrink, including the infamous 2004 dumping of WinFS and its resulting ground-up re-programming effort. So while the rest of the business world was wondering about the effects of all this Vista voodoo, I wanted to hear Microsoft's opinion. My invite to the actual launch event, however, seems to have been lost in the mail (ahem!), so I had to call Microsoft to find out. Surprise, surprise, they're happy as clams.

“It may have been a long road, but watching how our early adopters are responding to the platform, we know we've got a winner,” said Brad Goldberg, Microsoft's general manager of client product management. When I told him Lindo's comment, he didn't seem fazed.

“Vista was designed specifically to give business users recognizable benefits over the last generation platform,” Goldberg said. “That includes productivity, security, networking, and noticeably less reliance on IT.”

I've got to give him the last couple. My life with Vista over the last few months bore that out, specifically covering the new UAC authentication model, updated internal diagnostics (including error messages that actually speak English), a completely revamped networking client, and new IT tools such as the Reliability Monitor. This is a cool little deal that lets an IT guy use RDP to remote to a problem desktop and then pop up this little Reliability Monitor dashboard window.

That gives him a look at important reliability stats, including the basic health monitoring, but also recent installation activity. Means you no longer need to weed through those inevitable user lies after you ask them, “Did you install anything recently?” These features were built specifically so users would spend less time talking to the help desk, thus decreasing overall IT spending. And I think they'll have the desired effect -- at least to a degree.

Goldberg also said this version of Windows is far better prepared for initial deployment than its predecessors, citing more than a year of overall QA effort, by far the longest QA period in Microsoft's history. In fact, the features slicing done earlier in the development cycle was reportedly done specifically due to this phase. Cool how they can make development failures sound like conscientious quality control, right?

But, Microsoft also changed its compatibility practices with Vista. This story actually impressed me. For older Windows versions, software and driver compatibility programs were initiated near the end of the operating system's development cycle. With Vista, Microsoft has been testing compatibility across 2000 popular applications throughout the programming cycle, and conducting hardware compatibility efforts with specific vendors since the middle of last year. See, that actually makes me feel fuzzier, because it really is evident when you test the operating system.

So that means SP1 should be much less important to smooth performance than in the past three Windows versions. In fact, Goldberg was pushing some analyst's opinion that this time around “SP1 will almost be a non-event.” And Microsoft hopes that will translate to faster initial adoption than the past three versions, too.

And in a perfect world, the company would be right. But in a perfect world, we'd all be running $4,000 Alienware muscle machines that could take a Vista/Aero upgrade no problemo. Too bad most of corporate America is working on $800 Dell-type boxes that'll take to Vista like a squirrel to the front-end of a semi. And I'm not just complaining about Aero — although that is a big user-acceptance factor. The OS in general wants a fast CPU and mucho more RAM.

So Microsoft may have freed us from many of the software problems that bothered the early releases of previous Windows wonders; but in response the company has tied itself to its customers' ongoing hardware lifecycle programs. So personally, I'm not expecting faster-than-normal adoption rates no matter how easily the software gets installed. Business is business, and investing in new hardware means exhausting the old hardware first.