What's Been Yanked From Vista, And When

SecurID Support, May 2006: Although Bill Gates himself touted Windows Vista support for RSA's popular SecurID technology (and tokens), that support evaporated last month. Then, RSA chief executive Art Coviello revealed that Vista would not natively support the two-factor authentication technology, but might make it into future updates of the upcoming OS. (Typically, Microsoft releases a first service pack approximately 12-18 months after the debut of a new OS.)

PC-to-PC Sync, June 2006: One of several synchronization features planned for Vista -- all to be wrapped into a "Sync Center" -- PC-to-PC Sync would have synchronized files and folders between machines running Vista. The feature was cut before Windows Vista Beta 2 was released, Microsoft said, because "we don't have it at the quality level our customers demand."

XPS Support [Sort of], June 2006: Bowing to what it said were litigation threats from Adobe, Microsoft yanked the Save As PDF feature from its upcoming Office 2007 suite, and also modified its stance on XPS (XML Paper Specification), which will appear in Vista. The electronic document format -- seen by most as a competitor to Adobe's popular PDF (Portable Document Format) -- will remain in the operating system, but can be ditched by computer makers as they pre-load Vista onto machines. Early in June, a Microsoft program manager said that "in order to accommodate Adobe's concerns, we have made it so OEMs making PCs can choose to not include XPS as part of Windows."