The Corporate Edition of Windows Vista is already available but it’ll go on sale to the general public on Jan 30th 2007 and will come standard on any new PC. So, it’s crunch time over at Microsoft – the days before what Douglas Coupland, author of Microserfs calls RTM (Release to Manufacturing). I picture 2006 versions of the characters from Microserfs. Red Bull addled coders who haven’t taken their noses out of the code spread across 21” LCD monitor arrays for days. They’ll finally be able to step away from their workstations this Christmas season long enough to grab a glass of caffeinated egg – nog before they start working on the first slew of patches.

David Pogue – Mahone from NY Times gives his initial thoughts on Vista. The word on Vista is that it’s beautiful to look at but might be a bit of a head case. It features stylized menus that cast discreet shadows, subtle animations when the user conducts actions. But it’s also (according to Pogue) a close imitation of the Mac OS X. One rather cool feature of Vista, also built into IE7, is the automatic alert when you’re visiting a fake eBay auction or phishing site. There’s nothing like a bit of added security.

Despite its beauty, Vista seems like that high maintenance blonde chick everybody wanted to hook up with in school, but you end up feeling sorry for whoever married her. It has a serious split personality disorder once scratch below the surface.

Most of the operating system has been redesigned for a whole new look and feel. But there are corners of Vista that take you back to older versions of Windows leaving the user more than a bit disjointed. Sometimes links will appear on the left, sometimes on the right. Back buttons will sometime show up on the lower left corner, sometimes in the upper left. Little snags like this are liable to be patched.