SAN JOSE, Calif. - You might be ready for Vista, but is Vista ready for you?
Microsoft Corp. spent more than five years and $6 billion to build the new version of Windows, with a sleek look and plugged-up security holes.
Yet for all Vista's bells and whistles, it's still an operating system: the giant on whose shoulders other software programs will stand. These programs, from Adobe Acrobat to iTunes, lets consumers perform daily tasks like e-mailing and allows them to play graphics-heavy games or watch movies on their PCs. There is a new generation of programs that take advantage of the powerful code inside Vista, but much of that software won't be in stores for at least a year.
Even Microsoft Office 2007, which will be released along with Vista Jan. 30, is designed to run on the old Windows XP as well as Vista, the new operating system. That suggests that Microsoft acknowledges some people might want to get Office 2007 before they upgrade to Vista.
"The first order of business for most developers is to make sure their current XP product runs on Vista," said Michael Cherry, an analyst at Directions on Microsoft, a consultancy that specializes in the company. "I don't think anybody - including the Microsoft Office team - has really sat down and looked at Vista and asked, 'How do we write something that actually exploits this operating system?'"
Intuit, a Mountain View, Calif., personal finance and business management software maker, released a new version of its QuickBooks software last fall that's designed to bridge the gap between old Windows XP and new Vista operating systems.
"We first shipped QuickBooks back in 1993," said George Jaquette, Group Products Manager at Intuit. "To fundamentally rewrite it for Vista would reflect the same amount of work that Microsoft put into Vista, and it wouldn't give the consumer the additional bang for our buck."
Intuit did create a Vista desktop gadget for small businesses that tracks employee time on projects and sends the information to QuickBooks online. It's one of several nascent efforts that provide a glimpse into the Vista future that Microsoft is hoping will soon arrive.
"Software vendors are going to be able to make their applications a lot prettier on Vista," said Dana Gardner, president and principal analyst of Interarbor Solutions. "There's going to be a significant benefit in terms of user navigation and the ability to bring in multimedia and Web services into applications."
But how soon will that happen?
Microsoft has quietly launched a site (www.microsoft.com/windowsvista/innovation) to display new programs and gadgets that run on Vista. Seven of them were online as of Jan. 25, but Windows director of partner marketing Dave Wascha said he hopes to showcase two dozen more by Vista's Jan. 30 consumer launch.
One application, from The New York Times, will allow readers to browse a digital version of the newspaper with features like better-looking fonts and a dynamic zoom. Though the differences are largely cosmetic, the user experience is designed to be much closer to reading the print version than a Web site.
Another, from San Francisco start-up iBloks, lets people create and share three-dimensional blocks of photos, video and music files from their desktop.
At the Consumer Electronics Show this month, Microsoft executives also touted new Vista media and gaming software, like a TurboNick "channel" that displays Nickelodeon shows on the desktop (shipping Jan. 30 inside Vista Media Center), and several games that take advantage of the new DirectX 10 graphics architecture.
One of the most ambitious Vista applications is from Yahoo, an Internet company rarely mentioned among the major Windows software businesses. The Vista version of Yahoo Messenger, software for the company's instant-messenger service, will be available during the second quarter of this year and includes rich computer animation and pop-ups inside buddy lists.
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