Steve Ballmer, Microsoft's CEO was present at the New York Best Buy, on 529 5th Ave. (44th St. and 5th Ave.) to kick off the retail debut of Windows Vista. However, as you can well see from the images included herein, the combination of Steve Ballmer and Vista's Wow start moment failed to gather the crowd. The fact of the matter is that the store is far from deserted. In fact it is crawling with people. Not at the level of Microsoft's expectations, but crawling with people nonetheless.

And in fact this is the problem... people and not customers. Most of those you are able to see in the pictures are either Best Buy workers, journalists or Microsoft representatives. Not exactly the ideal consumer group for Microsoft's latest operating system.

"We had the chance yesterday morning to drop by the Midtown Manhattan Best Buy store to see Steve Ballmer and Best Buy CEO Brad Anderson, along with the Mason family from the Living with Windows Vista program, celebrate the launch of Windows Vista. Cassidy Mason shows Steve how the family used Windows Media Center to record TV shows for playback at a later time [image on the left]," revealed Nick White, Microsoft Product Manager.

However, this cannot be taken as a commercial failure of Windows Vista. The operating system is also on sale over the Internet, available for download from Microsoft and via OEM licenses. The true measure of Vista's launch success will come at the end of February when Microsoft and the world will draw the line on the first month of the operating system's commercial availability.