Early impressions of Microsoft Vista

I have a spare laptop of recent vintage around the house, and had some time on my hands this weekend--Carrie was working; I, uncharacteristically was not--so I downloaded and installed the public beta of the much-delayed and rescoped "Longhorn," the operating system that Microsoft is now calling Windows Vista.

I've also installed the public betas of the Office 2007 applications (Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook) plus Visio and Project.

My initial thoughts on Vista are all stock market-related.

• If you own Microsoft stock, strongly consider selling it now.
  
• If you don't own Microsoft stock, but have a margin account with your broker, strongly consider shorting (at least) a few hundred shares of it before the public release of this abortion (currently slated for November 2006 for business editions, and January 2007 for consumer editions.)
• Go long on Apple. Their new Intel Core Duo-based machines, which can run both OS X and Windows, are perfectly positioned to take advantage of Microsoft's impending stumble.
  

I am currently evaluating Ubuntu Linux as a potential desktop OS alternative, and am very happy (to say the least) with its performance, but in all honesty, if I go with a Unix-like OS in the near future, it's going to be Apple OS X.

My thoughts on the new Office applications are soon to follow. One item of note: Microsoft Word 2007 supports a number of common blogging platforms natively, including Blogger (I'm composing this post in Word 2007.)

Related:

• PC Magazine, Inside Windows Vista Build 5308
  
• Ubuntu Linux
• Apple Mac OS X