So I hear via foo that the next version of Windows is to be branded ‘“Vista”:http://www.microsoft.com/windowsvista/’ which according to the Visual Thesaurus means ‘the percept of a region’.

Not a bad name if you ask me, and a much needed departure from the whole ‘slap two letters from the alphabet together’ thing.

There is speak of Microsoft focusing less on the windows brand this time around, with ‘Vista’ taking centre stage (‘Vista Home’, ‘Vista Professional’, ‘Vista Server’ etc). As others have already stated this could be a good move and will encourage the view that this release perhaps represents a more substantial step forward from XP than critics might suggest.