Vista: Worth the upgrade?

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I admit that I was pretty skeptical about whether I could see both office users and consumers upgrading to Vista.  To me it seemed like Vista was just XP SP 3 that we where going to charge for.

After playing with a post Beta 1 build and a Brian Valentine demo this morning, I am convinced that everyone will see the benefits and justify the upgrade.  There were a few key features that are available in Beta 1 that put me over the edge.  It'll be great to see what ISV's do to exploit these coold new platform features.

  • RSS in IE7.  Need I say anything else?
  • OS integrated Search.  My thoughts on this were: "If we already have desktop search, why would we need an OS integrated search?".  The answer is by having contextual search such as File Explorer, or Document Explorer.  It is actually quite nice to have this feature that figures out exactly what you are trying to search for.
  • “Windows Presentation Foundation” aka Avalon.  This is the new graphical desktop that will actually utilize your graphics card.  The transparent windows are cool, but better yet the rotated tile feature lets me locate my applications quicker when I have a bunch open.  The graphical task switch bar is also pretty awesome to preview what I am trying to “task to”.
  • Virtual Folders.  Organizing your information regardless of where it is on the network or disk is a great way of organizing information

We saw some great Office 12 and Vista integration that makes it even more compelling, but you’ll have to wait for details until they enter Beta with Office 12.