Ballmer ushers in the Vista era

Microsoft on Thursday said Vista, along with a revamped Office and new Exchange email server, is completed and is now available to business customers. The company will make its newest version of Windows and Office 2007 available to consumers worldwide on 30 January.

CEO Steve Ballmer said at a press conference at the Nasdaq stock exchange in New York: "This is the biggest launch in the company's history. That's for sure."

Thursday's announcement offered little in the way of new information and served more as a rallying cry for corporate customers and the multitude of partners in the Windows ecosystem.

Ballmer alluded to the many delays to Vista. "It's an exciting thing to finally be here. That's all I'll say about the past," he said.

Despite Vista's long gestation period and the length of time since Windows XP's debut - more than five years - it's unlikely that many businesses will adopt the operating system immediately. The announcement is more likely to mark the start of serious testing within companies, analysts said.

Given Windows XP's unexpectedly long life and the interim release of several major revisions, or "service packs", driver and third-party application support is stable. Some third-party software and many drivers for connecting to hardware have had to be rewritten for Vista. Not all are available yet. Most analysts expect big companies to wait for at least the first round of service pack updates from Microsoft before they put Vista into daily service.

Ballmer downplayed the need for companies to wait for a service pack before adopting Vista. "We've built the highest-quality operating system we possibly can. We have many customers who are anxious to deploy. We will have a stronger, faster upgrade cycle for Vista than for Windows XP," he said.

Microsoft, undaunted, has high hopes for Vista adoption in the coming months. Ballmer said this will be the most widely marketed launch of any set of products that Redmond has ever done. The software behemoth will spend "hundreds of millions of dollars, a very big number" on Vista and Office 2007 marketing, he said. "It's more than we spent of Windows 95 and Office 95."

Ballmer said the launch marks the beginning of a long line of product releases in the coming year. "There will be an additional set of clients and servers coming in the next year. There are 30-plus new products for business customers as a result of this wave of innovation," he said.

One of those products is a new release of the server version of Windows, currently called Longhorn Server, which is expected next year.

Mike Ricciuti writes for CNET News.com