Thank you for purchasing or considering the purchase of Special Edition Using Microsoft Windows Vista Second Edition. It's amazing the changes that 20 years can bring to a computer product such as Windows. When we wrote our first Windows book back in the mid-1980s, our publisher didn't even think the book would sell well enough to print more than 5,000 copies. Microsoft stock wasn't even a blip on most investors' radar screens. Boy, were they in the dark! Who could have imagined that a little more than a decade later, anyone who hoped to get hired for even a temp job in a small office would need to know how to use Microsoft Windows, Office, and a PC. Fifteen or so Windows books later, we're still finding new and exciting stuff to tell our readers.
Some people (including the U.S. Department of Justice) claim Microsoft's predominance on the PC operating system arena was won unethically through monopolistic practices. Whether or not this is true (we try, almost successfully, to stay out of the politics in this book), we believe that Windows has earned its position today through reasons other than having a stranglehold on the market. Consider that Windows NT 3.1 had 5 million lines of code. Windows Vista weighs in with about 50 million and takes up 4 or 5 gigabytes (sometimes more!) of disk space by itself. This represents a lot of work by anyone's accounting. Who could have imagined in 1985 that a mass-market operating system two decades later would have to include support for so many technologies, most of which didn't even exist at the time: DVD, DVD±RW, CD-R and CD-RW, Internet and intranet, MP3, MPEG, WMA, DV, USB, FireWire, APM, ACPI, RAID, UPS, PPOE, gigabit Ethernet, 802.11g, WPA2, IPv6, Teredo, fault tolerance, disk encryption and compression...? The list goes on. And that 4GB of disk space Vista occupies? It would have cost more than a quarter of a million dollars in 1985. Today, it costs a dollar or two. Although rarely on the bleeding edge of technology, and often playing the role of the dictator with partner businesses and exterminator with competing businesses, Bill Gates has at least been benevolent from the users' point of view. In 1981, when we were building our first computers, the operating system (CP/M) had to be modified in assembly language and recompiled, and hardware parts had to be soldered together to make almost any new addition (such as a video display terminal) work. Virtually nothing was standardized, with the end result being that computers remained out of reach for average folks.
Together, Microsoft, Intel, and IBM changed all that. Today you can purchase a computer, a printer, a scanner, an external disk drive, a keyboard, a modem, a monitor, and a video card over the Internet, plug them in, install Windows, and they'll work together. The creation and adoption (and sometimes forcing) of hardware and software standards that have made the PC a household appliance the world over can largely be credited to Microsoft, like it or not. The unifying glue of this PC revolution has been Windows. Yes, we all love to hate Windows, but it's here to stay. Linux and Mac OS X are formidable alternatives, but for most of us, at least for some time, Windows and Windows applications are "where it's at." And Windows Vista ushers in truly significant changes to the landscape. That's why we were excited to write this book.
