A post by Matt made me aware of a page about Productivity and information management features in the latest and exciting installment of Microsoft™'s acclaimed Operating™ System™ - Windows™ Vista™.

Matt picked out a few features that he found particularly compelling, and I've picked out my own.

Internet Explorer

Windows Vista includes major enhancements to Internet Explorer. In addition to the security and privacy features and enhancements, Windows Vista Internet Explorer Beta 1 offers an early glimpse of how Microsoft is redesigning Internet Explorer to make everyday tasks easier—for instance, with tabbed browsing, inline search, and shrink-to-fit printing. It also provides new tools to give you direct access to the information you want with built-in support for Web Feeds (also known as RSS, or Really Simple Syndication). Windows Vista Internet Explorer also delivers a simplified and updated user interface, as well as improvements to the platform for Web developers.

Tabbed browsing, inline search, and shrink-to-fit printing, the ability to read RSS feeds directly in your browser? IE7 is sure to leave Firefox in the dust.

Web improvements

Windows Vista includes some commonly requested improvements that provide a rich and flexible platform for Web developers—for example, transparent Portable Network Graphics (PNG), which lets Web designers create compelling overlaid page designs.

Good that Microsoft™ continues its commitment to the latest web standards.

Metro documents

Knowledge workers can securely collaborate by using a new, easy-to-create, XML-based, fixed-format document, code-named "Metro" This format can be created directly from any application, and is simply a page-by-page view of content as it would have been rendered by a printer. Metro documents retain all of the fidelity of the original source material and all the necessary resources such as fonts and images for rendering. In Windows Vista Beta 1, Metro documents do not require you to have the original authoring application to be viewed, but are instead viewable within the included Metro Viewer, which is hosted by Internet Explorer 7 on any Windows Vista computer with the WinFX runtime APIs installed. The Metro viewer can also be hosted by Windows XP computers with Internet Explorer 6, but likewise, WinFX must be installed. While the Metro document format is ideal for sharing content in an application-independent way, it is also an ideal archival format as well. Microsoft is freely licensing Metro, which means that the format can be created and consumed on many different platforms and classes of devices, ensuring that Metro documents will integrate well.

Yet more keen innovation. Imagine, being able to print to a file, and then sharing that file with the people that you work with. With wide cross-platform support, and cunning use of XML, this is sure to catch on.

I think you'll all agree that Open Source can never compete with the powerful development force of Microsoft™