Electricity, water, gas and phone. They are all utilities. You expect them to work and they do nearly all the time. When is the last time your phone line went down? How about the last time your water stopped working? For the vast majority of people, outages are few and far between. Their utilities just work.
Could the same thing be said about Microsoft Windows? Looking back nearly 12 years ago when Windows 95 launched, there was an excitement in the air. PC users camped outside stores hoping to be one of first to install the new OS and get rid of Windows 3.1 and DOS. Windows 95 was a monumental leap in usability and stability. But much of the excitement and focus was Microsoft touting how much better off we’d all be once Windows 95 arrived which is a subtle jab at previous versions of Windows. If you were using Windows 3.1 back then you were probably willing to try nearly anything that would improve productivity. Getting on the internet with Windows 3.1 was such a pain in the butt that many people upgraded to Windows 95 thinking it would solve that problem. And so this trend continued over the the years. Microsoft would ready a new OS and one of the primary selling features was how much better it was than the previous version.
But now we have the arrival Windows Vista is just over a week away and there’s very little excitement. Nearly all the reviews I’ve read say it’s a nice “facelift” over XP but nothing major for the most part. The cost to upgrade from XP will run from $100 to $250 which is a lot of money when you can buy a really nice machine for $750 now. Maybe it’s more about XP being quite good than it is about Vista not living up to expectations. I happen to like Vista a lot. But it’s not as exciting as the first time I installed Windows 95 off 13 or 14 diskettes!
What I think is happening is that Windows has stabilized enough to the point where it’s become a utility for many people. Back in the Window 3.1 days you were aware of the OS much more because it would stall, hang, or blue screen on a regular basis. But since XP I can probably count on one hand the times Windows has blue screened on me. In a nutshell, XP just works. It doesn’t require another $100 worth of software to make it work the way it should. It’s like water or electricity. It requires very little babysitting anymore. And I believe this is a good thing. The less time I spending tweaking, configuring, or babysitting Windows, the more time I do the stuff I really enjoy like listening to music, watching movies, playing games or blogging.
Nordquist Blog 
We’ve probably seen the last of the revolutionary jumps in Operating Systems, at least until someone designs one entirely web-based. That being said, I think what Microsoft is trying to do is show how Vista will make it easier for you to listen to music, watch movies, games especially with Direct X 10, etc.
Alas, they’ve spent to much time talking about the face-lift, and they’ve forgotten to actually talk about what Vista does better. After using it for a few months, they should be trying to sell me on the built in Search function, which gets me to my apps 100 times faster than ever before, esp. considering that the new Start menu is absolutely horrid, like a massive step back in terms of ease of use for those who have a lot of apps installed.
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That’s a good point you make about touting the noticeable features like Aero while the new search is really the killer feature. Search is so good now that it’s changed the way I use my PC and my expectations for other programs. I guess search isn’t sexy enough?
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