Well, Jim Allchin has declared RTM -- release to manufacturing -- for Windows Vista. The next version of Windows is officially ready to ship to business customers. Allchin, co-president of Microsoft's Platforms & Services Division, said, "This is a good day!" enthusiastically and often during today's conference call (that's easy for him to say -- he gets to retire after Vista finally ships to retail customers on Jan. 30.) So what are we getting in Vista? It's not an easy question to answer.Microsoft hasn't done a particularly good job of providing answers, either. Or maybe it's that they've offered so many explanations -- when you're in development for six years, you do have some time to fill. At any rate, I don't think the Vista story is reaching the marketplace. Today is the culmination of almost two years of beta versions and community technology previews and pre-release candidates, and still I hear quite a bit of "What's it good for?" and almost no "I've got to have it."

I think there is a Vista story to tell. It just hasn't been told particularly well. I caught a glimpse of it last week. The Vista product-management team went out on its RTM Tour, an obligatory part of the public-relations drill for any new Microsoft product. I met Greg Sullivan, a group product manager for Vista who was not just professionally but personally enthusiastic about Vista.

I made the usual complaints that the most exciting parts of Vista were in the product plan but not in the product; that it was going to take a hardware upgrade to run an OS upgrade that puts transparent borders on windows. I was polite, but I was, I admit, negative.

Sullivan responded by saying, basically, that just because Vista looks like something familiar -- an operating system, a version of Windows -- that doesn't mean it's not fundamentally different. He listed the three major "platform" pieces of Vista: Windows Presentation Platform, WPF, formerly known as Avalon; Windows Future Storage, WinFS, formerly known as WinFS, and Windows Connectivity Foundation, WCF, formerly known as Indigo. These rest on a "Fundamentals" layer that includes a lot of the initiatives for security, reliability, performance, information management and hardware support that represent major investments of both time and money in Vista, and turn support a new programming interface, .NET 3.0 (formerly known as WinFX), that replaces the Win32 APIs.

Of all those pieces, only WinFS didn't happen, he said, and taken all together, they constitute a rearchitecting of the Windows internals of the sort that happens only once in a decade or more. His examples were mostly drawn from the area everybody is already most familiar with, graphics: he contrasted the old GDI graphics stack with Avalon's DirectX 9 and new WDDM driver model. GDI was 15-year-old technology that caused a lot of the blue screens in Windows, he said, while the new Avalon technology, because the video driver runs in user mode, can restart a crashed driver without a reboot and lost data.

That's a concrete example of a real improvement. I'd like to hear a couple of dozen more as we move toward Jan. 30 and the general availability of Vista.

We need to hear more about what Vista is going to do for businesses, too. So far, Microsoft's focus has largely been on trying to sell Vista to application developers and end users. But too many of those selling points aren't about the OS at all, but about the applications bundled with it -- Photo Center, Media Center, parental controls. Sullivan talked about the advantages of separating the OS image from hardware and language support, so that large organizations will have just one image to deploy worldwide. That's a goodness. What about some more manageability stories?

Unfortunately, many of the other boxes in Sullivan's diagram still contain question marks, and no amount of story-telling is going to solve that. Jim Allchin talked up the fundamentals today -- especially the security of Vista -- but that's exactly where the jury's still out. It will stay out until third-party drivers are finally available (something Allchin and Sullivan both say should happen quickly, now that final Vista code is available) and hardware running Vista begins to pile up some real-world use. It's time for Vista to begin showing us what it's got.