Then, we drifted to CPM/80. Remember that? Wordstar, dBase II, Supercalc (or even Multiplan) were the reasons we went there. If you remember dBase II reading / writing on 143k floppy disks and double sided meant you took the disk out, punched a hole on the other edge and inserted it, you'll remember the agony of the Apple II floppies. Still, they were enabling.

Why did we go MS-DOS and the IBM-PC. Surely one primary answer - Lotus 1-2-3, followed by Word Perfect 5.1, dBase III. And the gee-whiz 10Mb hard disk.

Windows 3.1? We wanted Excel, Word. More importantly, Windows 3.1 motivated full page-at-once laser printers (or was it the other way around). We wanted to move on from mono-spaced font to proportional font and grab some of that modern layout look.

Windows 95? Well, you see Windows 3.1 kept dying and the screen display, (do you remember 640x480 pixels) was a bit on the sparse side? "Not many cells on a spreadsheet, see you can", Yoda would say.

Then Windows 98 - An evolution of Windows 98, but a whole host of technical improvements, USB support, established FAT32 support. But it wasn't a night and day impact. More importantly, it was not markedly expensive or markedly demanding of hardware upgrades - if your machine ran Windows 95 well, Windows 98 was ok. And you know what they say about Microsoft software - it takes them three attempts to get it right?

Windows NT 4 -> Windows 2000 -> Windows XP? Same deal. Three attempts.

And so we come to Windows Vista. What does it have? Well, a big ticket price. Unless they discount a lot.

It could have had a new file system (WinFS) with metadata and database sub-system. It doesn't - it still uses classic indexing of files.

It could have had XAML and Windows Presentation Foundation with all those XML things. But it doesn't. Aah, thanks to Stephen for the correction, WPF *will* be part of Vista. But it appears to be also available for Windows XP and Server 2003 - so will the Vista experience be unique enough?

It has SyncManager - to improve on the notorious ActiveSync for PocketPC / Windows Mobile. That'll do mobile phones too. That might help GTD fans. Only.

It does have the Windows sidebar (hey, but we had that in IE 4 / Windows 98).

Not all versions of Vista will fly with Aero. So you won't be able to Alt+Tab like a pack of cards shuffled sideways. Like huh?

Ok, it has Enhanced Security? Big Beef since Microsoft has an incredibly, nearly indelible bad image in that area - even amongst the general public.  If you use Ubuntu, you'll note that there are huge lists of updates queued to install from time to time. But Linux hasn't got anything near the bad image.  But looking through the eyes of home users, how does UAC (User Access Control) blocking nearly every worthwhile move (making Vista, Ubuntu like) endear Vista to them?

So there you go. I'll keep searching for a cause.