Angus Kidman30 January 2007, 2:18 AM
The projector didn't work, Rogue Traders appeared by accident, and apparently all the best bits of Vista are actually Windows Ultimate Extras. Oh, and Microsoft is partnering with Sanity for the world's most overpriced subscription music service.
More than 120 Australian tech hacks dragged themselves to Circular Quay this morning for breakfast canapés and the official consumer launch of Windows Vista and Office 2007. One key incentive would have been naked greed -- everyone attending got full copies of Vista Ultimate and Office. (The traditional time-zone-driven argument that Australia was the first launch event and we should all feel special got shot in the foot when Microsoft threw a pre-launch launch in New York on January 29.)
Vista has been in development for so long that it's hard to imagine we'd learn anything new at a highly orchestrated mass market event. Yet there were in fact some fresh nuggets of information to be gleaned. Here's our top five lessons from the Vista launch:
(1) Apparently, the main reason to get Vista is for Ultimate Extras. During his demonstration of Vista, Windows client director Jeff Putt devoted considerable time to showing off DreamScene, which replaces your desktop wallpaper with video footage, and Group Shot, which combines faces from different photos to avoid the "Kevin blinked again" phenomenon.
The merits of these features are debatable (our $0.05: DreamScene is a system crash waiting to happen and a potential battery-draining nightmare, while Group Shot is pretty cool). But both are Ultimate Extras, only available to owners of the hyper-priced topline edition and hence not of relevance to a large proportion of the potential Vista user base. In the case of DreamScene, the product also won't be finalised until mid-year. We wait five years for an OS upgrade and the demos are for stuff we still can't get?
(2) Vista is a platform for big, obvious partnerships. Australian consumers will get three specific service offerings as part of Vista: access to online printing via Kodak, movie rental downloads from BigPond via Media Center, and subscription music services from Sanity (more on that one below). Granted, it's nice that there are even options (previous bundled services with Windows have tended to be strictly of the ISP variety), but none of them are exactly show-stoppers and it would be better to have choices rather than being stuck with a single provider in each case.
(3) Microsoft believes the perfect complement to a $300 operating system is a $500-a-year subscription music service. In April, Sanity Digital will launch an all you can eat music subscription service built into Windows Media Player 11. Exact details are sketchy, but CEO Greg Milne said that the cost will be roughly equivalent to "a couple of CDs". Even at a generous $20 price point, that still adds up to $480 a year. Assume $30 a CD, and it's probably going to cost more than the broadband service you'll need to access it.
There's also plenty of question marks around the service, even though Microsoft boasts its the first WMP11 subscription offering outside the US. As a Plays for Sure-driven service, it clearly won't work with iPods, which is probably a bit of a market killer. It's not even apparent whether it will work with Zune, though that probably won't matter until we get an actual local release of the little brown music box that couldn't.
(4) The company's taste in celebrities is slowly on the mend. The obligatory entertainment was provided by Rogue Traders, while hosting was handled by drivetime radio DJs Hamish and Andy. This is a considerable improvement on the Windows XP launch, which boasted the weird combo of Rove McManus and Bardot. But it's still not a patch on the incomparable Barry Humphries at the Windows 95 launch.
Being nasty and cynical, we also feel obliged that the attempted comic presenter introduction for Rogue Traders was entirely messed up. However, the band's performance was so good that we didn't really care.
(5) No-one had time for a full technical rehearsal. Commendably, Vista didn't crash once during the demonstrations. We wish we could say the same for the projector that was in use, which varied between not working at all and offering a dimly-lit, wobbly image that tended to induce nausea if you watched it for more than 10 seconds. Microsoft staffers handled the stuff-ups with good grace, but we imagine heads are going to roll at some AV production company real soon now. Adding insult to injury, the Windows Games demonstration booth outside the main event had its screens exposed to full sunlight, which didn't help matters either. Presumably they won't make that mistake again at the next Windows launch event in 2012.