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365 days and 100 million licenses later, enthusiasm for a safe, reliable and engaging Windows Vista experience is high.

Since the worldwide release of Windows Vista one year ago today, people are doing more and getting more out of their Windows experience. From pictures and videos, to games and family safety settings, users are finding out that they can do more with Windows Vista.

We commissioned independent studies from IPSos and NPD to explore the attitudes of users about the operating system not only in the U.S., but also in China, France, Germany, Japan, and the UK. According to NDP, 70 percent of these users say it's an improvement over their previous operating system.

Windows Vista is the first operating system to build in parental controls. And they sure have changed things in the Charney household. For my ten-year-old, Ruby, they've helped make sure that her browsing habits are safe. Parental controls have also removed the argument about when she has to stop using the PC because after a certain hour, she simply can't log on. She participated in that discussion and agreed to the rules, and now we don't have to have that debate every night.

We've worked diligently with industry partners to increase the number of Windows Vista-compatible applications and devices, while also building support for them. While we were happy with what we launched with, we also built the system to update seamlessly with the new technology that has been and will be added every day.
Today, Windows Vista supports over 43,000 hardware products, almost doubling the 23,000 thousand at launch.

We pay a lot of attention to and continually work not only on the performance of Windows Vista but also on people's experience of performance. We get data from people who file bugs - Microsoft tech support, our OEM partners - and we pay attention to press, bloggers and enthusiasts’ web sites.

Microsoft has invested heavily in security improvements for products for about six years now, and we're seeing the results of that commitment in Windows Vista. I think it's fair to say that Windows Vista is proving to be the most secure version of Windows to date.
There are many areas of progress, but I'd like to point to three: the ability to run as a standard user, a set of Internet Explorer capabilities that help protect us from outside threats - the Phishing Filter and improved authentication of secure transactions with Extended Validation SSL - and the efforts of Windows Defender to clean spyware and other potentially unwanted software.

Windows Vista is the first operating system we’ve built with gamers and gaming in mind. Hardcore gamers have responded with more than ten million of them around the world already running Windows Vista
For these gamers, we created a whole new graphics technology and engine in Windows Vista—DirectX 10. A new generation of games is being developed to take advantage of the capabilities of the DirectX 10 compatible graphics cards and Windows Vista, and it’s exciting to see what kind of great experiences this is creating for gamers.

We look forward to providing more exciting experiences for Windows Vista users in the coming year.

News source: Microsoft.com