I guess it's a big day for Windows fans: The long-awaited first public pre-release version of Windows Vista Service Pack 1 (SP1) is upon us, like an answered prayer from Redmond. At the risk of sounding like a spoilsport, however, SP1 isn't really all that exciting. As I noted in my previous SP1 missive, Inside Windows Vista Service Pack 1, it is instead very much an evolutionary update to Microsoft's latest client operating system, one that, in the words of Microsoft itself, doesn't really change the Vista value proposition.

What makes Vista a big deal, really, isn't so much what's in it as what's behind it. You see, there's this perception in the Windows world that businesses won't deploy any new Windows OS until the first service pack ships. Microsoft had hoped to avoid this problem by ensuring that Vista was the highest quality version of Windows they'd ever made, with the theory being that it was so good that no business would want to wait. Obviously, that's not what happened at all. And as I write this in the waning days of 2007, Microsoft is on track to sell about 100 million Windows Vista licenses in its first year on the market, well short of any internal or external goals.