Wired on Friday: So now the future is clear: Microsoft's next major operating system release, which up to now has been known by its codename, Longhorn, will be named Windows Vista on its release next year.
But despite the pre-announcement, there's every chance that this news, of the type that would once have thrilled the geek world, will be greeted with little more than a collective shrug. Less than 12 months before the arrival of Vista, there appears to be little enthusiasm for it among either technophiles or the general public. Most computer users haven't even heard of it, and even fewer are excited about it.
The features that have been trotted out so far have been esoteric: new graphics capabilities, features that may make it easier for developers to create applications, but nothing that really appeals to the average user.
There are three connected problems that Microsoft faces with Vista. The first is simply that a lack of competition effectively gives its developers little incentive to make truly great leaps forward. Over 90 per cent of the world's personal computers run one flavour or another of Windows.
Even its most important foes - Apple's Mac OS X and Linux - have little in the way of real market share. And, despite Apple's recent success, this shows little sign of changing. Want a new computer? You're probably going to get Windows on it, and, if it's a corporate computer, you're almost certain to get Windows on it.
The second problem is simply that the current version of Windows - XP - is actually good enough for the majority of people. Of course, it still has plenty of problems, not least of which is that it adopts an approach to security that is charitably described as lackadaisical. But even here, the company has made improvements, and the latest release of Windows XP at least makes it more difficult for spyware and the like to riddle the operating system. If you have up-to-date anti-virus and anti-spyware packages and keep Windows itself up to date, then your machine will be reasonably secure.
Yes, there are still plenty of areas where Window XP isn't easy enough to use - Bluetooth connections to mobile phones, for example, can vary between ridiculously simple and abominably Byzantine - but all these are areas which can be addressed by gradual improvements just as Apple has gradually improved aspects of Mac OS X without having to move to Mac OS XI (yet).
But the third problem is actually perhaps the most serious of all for Microsoft. When the company released Windows 95 in a huge blaze of publicity, the personal computer was the centre of the technological world. The internet was, for most people, either a complete unknown or seen through the lens of online services like AOL. The world wide web, as we know it, barely existed. And peripherals were just printers and scanners. Even digital cameras were rare and expensive - and designed solely to be slaves of the PC.
Now the centre of excitement has moved away from the PC and outwards, towards the huge range of tiny devices that we use every day of our lives. As an indication of this, take a look at Apple's website, which is dominated by the iPod and (as I write) barely even mentions the Mac.
Despite its technical limitations, the iPod has become a cultural icon in a way that the Windows-based desktop hasn't, changing both the music industry's attitudes to downloading songs and the way that people listen to music.
The same is true of that other cultural icon of the century so far, the mobile phone, and especially the camera phone, which has plugged itself directly into the internet and fostered both new cultural phenomena and at least one scare story in the form of the "happy slapping" hysteria, which is always a sign of something's importance.
And it's out there at the periphery that Microsoft's influence is felt the least. Although it has attempted to use its Windows hegemony to muscle its way into both the mobile phone and portable music markets, so far it has met with little success - perhaps, in part, because in both cases it has tried to tie things a little too much to Windows.
Hence Microsoft's problem with Windows Vista. Not only is it finding it hard to find compelling new features (and "it's like the old one, but actually works better!" isn't compelling) but it's no longer the centre of attention. Like a fading movie actress, it's still got presence, but it long ago got pushed aside from centre stage.
