A Day a long time in the making, Vista’s team has just announced that Vista is finished and has been given to manufacturing for duplication.

And just what is this so-called RTM? It’s the major milestone where we can confidently say that Microsoft is done with Windows Vista and will be handing it off to our industry partners: PC makers, ISVs and IHVs. They in turn will continue to ramp-up in earnest now that the target is locked — for example, by refining hardware drivers — in order to complete the cycle and make Windows Vista available via retail channels on 30 January 2007. On that date Windows Vista and the 2007 Microsoft Office system will be available to customers around the world.

I’ve been using Vista since Beta 1 and I’m looking forward to the RTM version. While there are plenty of naysayers out there, I’m very happy with the performance of Vista. Is it a huge leap over XP? No .. not even close really. But it is an upgrade on the eyes somewhat with solid performance upgrades.

On the downside, Vista could have been SO much more, and I’m not sure why it’s not. If you have look at this YouTube clips from PDC 2003 … Longhorn (Vista’s codename) had the vision to be an awesome OS.

What Vista was supposed to be:

another video after the jump ..