Operating systems: Today is the day Windows Vista is officially available for sale in stores. Speaking in New York, Microsoft chairman Bill Gates likened it to a predecessor. “Windows 95 was key to its era, and Vista is key to the era we have today.” CEO Steve Ballmer, meanwhile, said that he expects Vista to sell five times as many copies as Windows 95, adding that Vista is not the final client OS. “We’ve got a very long list of stuff our engineers want to do … There are so many areas where we need innovation.” As is typical of new OS releases, Microsoft trumpeted right along with its harem of hardware vendors — AMD, Dell, Gateway, Hewlett-Packard, Intel, Lenovo, among others — all of whom are somehow involved in creating faster and more capacious PCs in accordance with Vista. Related: Ongoing coverage of Vista: the next generation. Columnist’s corner: Turning his skeptic’s eye toward the recent marriage of Open Source Development Labs and the Free Standards Group, Neil McAllister suspects the real motive is somewhat less than philanthropic. “The Linux Foundation isn’t really about open standards and it isn’t about open source,” he writes in this week’s Open Enterprise. “It’s an industry trade organization, the likes of which we’ve seen countless times before. Judging by its charter, its true goal is little more than plain, old-fashioned corporate marketing.”SOA: Confusion is stirring about loose coupling and SOA. Whereas the advantages are known to IT pros who have built architectures in the past, the business value is not as apparent, points out David Linthicum in Real World SOA. For one, IT “can change business systems as needed, with much more agility than if the architecture/systems was more tightly coupled.” Technology Industry