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Vista: Microsoft's Last 'Big Bang' Operating System?: Page 3 of 3

Vista and Office won't come preloaded on new PCs till Jan. 30, the date of Vista's big consumer launch. Companies that want them now must upgrade their PCs, never an easy task. Vista is "going to want better-performance processors, more memory, and newer configurations," says Margaret Lewis, director of commercial ISV marketing at Advanced Micro Devices.

Vista will run on underpowered hardware, but only with its new Aero graphical user interface and other features disabled. How can IT departments know whether PC hardware is up to the task? "That's the $64,000 question," says Lewis.

Microsoft, of course, wants customers to adopt its new products quickly. Last week's demos included the newly designed Windows Start menu, which consolidates commands and incorporates desktop and network search-engine software, and features the ability to use an on-screen calendar to graphically search for documents based on when they were created. An Office add-on called Outlook Voice Access lets users check voice mail and e-mail using verbal commands, hear an e-mail read by the computer, or manage a calendar by voice.

Such features will be key, Ballmer suggested, in helping workers deal with information overload, companies become more distributed, and business managers deal with Sarbanes-Oxley and other regulations related to data storage. "The world's changing," he said. The software business is also in flux, and Microsoft has its work cut out there as well.