Vista: waiting for something

The general consensus is that Vista will be successful because firms will be forced to deploy it either due to Microsoft licensing stipulations (Software Assurance) or due to hardware upgrade cycles. But the cloud that hovers over Vista is that most firms and most users do not have a compelling reason to upgrade from XP. However, there are a lot of pundits out there who just seem to want to wish users into enthusiastically adopting Vista:

Microsoft will be omnipresent…in retrospect, this wasn’t a very aggressive prediction. I was right, but 2007 is shaping up to be the Year of Vista, whereas 2006 was the Year of Vista Delays

Why? No one knows, but something must be out there:

Something like that could start to happen in 2007. Vista is so much better than its predecessor operating systems that I think it will give the entire computer industry a pleasant kick forward. Expect everybody from Dell and HP to miscellaneous graphics card, peripheral and memory makers to benefit. And who knows what new applications will follow in Vista’s wake?

Even Office 2007 has received tepid reviews. Today’s WSJ review:

If you’d like to get more out of Office, especially in the area of how your documents look, Office 2007 is a big step forward, and worth the steep learning curve it imposes. If you’re happy with Office now, or you mostly create plain documents where formatting and design aren’t high priorities, it may not be worth the effort to buy and learn the new version.

So what’s out there?