Windows Vista — XP's Successor, Launched in Two Steps

Windows Vista has two release dates, and both are correct. Business customers on volume licensing got it on 30 November 2006; consumers, and organisations without a volume licence agreement, could buy it from 30 January 2007. The second date is the one most people mean. On that day Vista went on sale in more than 70 countries and 19 languages, at more than 39,000 retail stores and online, and the Japanese edition went on sale the same day — Japan was in the first wave.

Development had finished earlier: Microsoft released Vista to manufacturing on 8 November 2006, after release candidates in September and October.

Two launches

Why two steps? The November event was aimed at companies that buy Windows under volume licence agreements and plan deployments months ahead. Steve Ballmer announced business availability of Vista, the 2007 Microsoft Office system and Exchange Server 2007 together. Microsoft called it the most significant product launch in company history, and the first simultaneous release of its flagship products since Windows 95 and Office 95 more than a decade earlier.

Microsoft said product development had drawn on customers who let it watch them work in more than a billion user sessions, and that more than five million beta copies had been downloaded. Ballmer said he expected more than 200 million people to be using at least one of the new products by the end of 2007. These are Microsoft's figures and forecasts.

The consumer launch

On 29 January 2007 Bill Gates introduced Vista at a celebration in New York, and the products went on sale the next day. Microsoft's release gave the scale: more than 70 countries, 19 languages with 99 expected by the end of the year, and more than 39,000 retail stores. It said more than 1.5 million devices and peripherals on the market already worked with Vista, of which more than 2,500 were "Certified for Windows Vista".

The features Microsoft put up front were consumer ones: a redesigned, more graphical interface; easier ways to create and share photos, music and video; Parental Controls for managing children's PC and Internet use; and Windows Defender against spyware.

In Japan: the same day

Japan got Vista on the same day. ITmedia reported that on 30 January Microsoft Japan announced the general launch of the Japanese editions of Vista and the 2007 Office system, and that 41 partner companies would roll out 45 services for Vista. It counted about five years and two months since the Japanese edition of Windows XP on 16 November 2001, and twelve years since an operating system and an office suite had last gone on general sale together, with Windows 95 and Office 95.

Reference prices for the full Japanese packages had been published before launch:

"Vista Capable"

The most lasting controversy began before launch. In part to keep PC demand from dropping off during the 2006 holiday season, Microsoft and PC makers put "Windows Vista Capable" labels on some XP computers, and marked more powerful machines "Premium Ready".

A lawsuit argued that the "Capable" label misled buyers, because many of those computers were not powerful enough to support all of Vista's features, including the Aero interface. It was certified as a class action in February 2008, and the case brought into the open large numbers of e-mails between Microsoft, PC makers and chipmakers questioning the marketing plan. According to the AP, some of them indicated that Microsoft had lowered its "Vista Capable" standards to take in a line of Intel chips. In February 2009 Judge Marsha Pechman decertified the class, finding that the plaintiffs had not proved Microsoft artificially inflated demand, but she left individuals free to sue, writing that the e-mails raised enough questions about whether the marketing could deceive shoppers.

The case turned on a gap between Vista's full feature set and the PCs being sold as ready for it.

What came after

Hardware continuity was a theme of the next version. When Microsoft first showed Windows 7 in October 2008, it said the new version was designed to be compatible with the same hardware, applications and device drivers as Windows Vista. Windows 7 went on sale on 22 October 2009, less than three years after Vista's consumer launch.

According to Microsoft's lifecycle data, mainstream support for Vista ended on 10 April 2012 and extended support on 11 April 2017.

For the wider picture see the Microsoft timeline, the operating systems timeline and Microsoft.