Microsoft will stop at nothing from making Windows Vista as ubiquitous as Windows XP. And the adjacent image constitutes more than sufficient proof of this strategy, illustrating the Redmond company's immense efforts poured into generalizing Vista to the levels of an international standard and a monopoly on the operating system market. It also offers a clue to how Microsoft managed to ship in excess of 60 million Vistas in the first six months of the operating system's consumer availability. I suspect some foul play and that these pens were somehow involved in the matter. It's one thing to actually push 60 million Windows Vista licenses worldwide and it is another thing altogether to correlate that figure with the copies of the operating system actually sold.

And just in case you were wondering, Microsoft does not claim to have sold 60 million Vista licenses since January 30 and until July 31. But in all fairness, nothing beats Windows Vista Certified stationery. The pen will not need security patches, reliability, performance and compatibility updates or even the deployment of service packs. This is 'what you see is what you get' deal. But one thing that the pen offers is Windows Vista Aero. Just feast your eyes on the elegant transparency effects. Wrapper? No, it's not a wrapper, it's the Glass Aero graphical user interface. And an apex of how Microsoft understands to deliver more natural interfaces into the hands of the end users.

Actually there is one exceptional similarity between this pen and the Windows Vista operating system - the fact that neither of the two will get additional features with the availability of Vista SP1 in the first quarter of the coming year. The pen will obviously be unaffected and for the most part so will Windows Vista. And speaking of similarities... both the pen and Vista have an obscure market share. Well, the stationary item is virtually unknown and Windows Vista, at the end of the first six months since the consumer launch, accounts for no more than 5.41% of the operating system market. Of course that Windows XP is still the dominant platform with 81.40%. But Vista will, from next year, be the only available operating system from Microsoft in a world with over 1 billion Windows users...