Windows Vista dropped no less than five years after Windows XP. Made available to business customers in November 2006, and to the general consumers in January 2007, Vista is the next natural step in the evolution from XP. However, with XP SP2 having taken XP's market share to over 80%, the Windows crowd failed to take an immediate shine to Vista's Wow. Despite this, Vista increased its audience over the past year at a slow but steady pace. During his keynote address at the 2008 International Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates revealed that Vista's install base had passed the 100 million milestone as of the end of 2007.

Now the Redmond company is featuring a new Flash-based animation/advertisement for the latest Windows client on the Windows Vista official website. The initiative is meant to asses what was the impact of the operating system in the past year since its launch. I have also included screenshots illustrative of the ad in this article.

Just to sum it up, Microsoft claims that "since the launch of Windows Vista - people are convinced - people are more confident - people are waiting less - and people are safer online." That's it! Vista is two weeks short of its first anniversary since it hit the shelves, and Microsoft can sum up all its impact into just four phrases. Wow!

"When choosing a new operating system, the first thing many people ask is, "What will it help me do?" In answer, much of this site shows you the great experiences Windows Vista helps you have. The second thing many people say is, "Prove that it's better." In particular, many of you have asked about performance and safety improvements. The following information provides specific proof that Windows Vista is faster and safer," reads an excerpt of a message from the Vista page that invites the users to take a look at the features of the operating system.

According to Microsoft: "the majority of Windows Vista-based PCs boot in less than a minute. (...) Based on their first 180 days of availability, Windows Vista has been shown to have fewer vulnerabilities than Windows XP or MacOS X 10.4. (...) Windows Vista-based PCs are almost three times less likely to be infected with potentially unwanted software than Windows XP-based PCs. (...) And Internet Explorer 712 is now blocking nearly 1 million attempts to access these fake sites per week."