There were no catastrophic failures, no blue screens, in fact nothing remarkable at all at Microsoft Australia's official launch of Vista, Office and Exchange 2007. We'd heard it all before.
Microsoft Australia has formally launched Vista, Office and Exchange 2007 for business volume licence customers -- the first subsidiary in the world to do so due to Australia's time zone.
Industry analyst Gartner immediately poured cold water on the launch, saying it expected than less than 10 per cent of PCs would be running Vista by the end of next year.
Microsoft called it "the most significant product launch in company history", but its presentation was noticeably lacking any of the glitz that surrounded the Windows 95 launch. (That will probably come later for the consumer launch in January.)
The company demonstrated a handful of features in Vista, Office and Exchange, including dial-in voice recognition for Exchange 2007 and built-in undelete ("shadow copy") in Vista.
Microsoft also wheeled out a number of corporate early adopter customers that spoke about the vast productivity improvements they'd been able to make by buying vast amounts of Microsoft software.
Likewise, there was an IT consultant who spoke about the vast amounts of money he'd been able to make by supporting customers with vast amounts of Microsoft software. "Microsoft really looks after their partners," he said.
The event went smoothly but was unremarkable -- it was a ceremonial launch only, as nothing at all was revealed that wasn't already publicly known.
 Jeff Putt: the Microsoft Australia Windows chief spins some disks |
 You, yes you: need to buy Vista (Steve Vamos, Microsoft Australia MD) |
 Did you say Aardvark?: Office chief Tony Wilkinson calls in to Exchange Server 2007. (Amazingly, it understood him perfectly.) |