The press release is here, but it leads to a Windows Media clip which I am not even going to try to watch on this crappy dial-up connection.
And before anyone tells me how lame the name is, please see if you can say, with a straight face, that it is somehow less cool than (deep breath): Tiger, Panther, Jaguar, RedHat, Fedora, Debian, BSD, Solaris, Mandriva, Ubuntu, Gentoo, Knoppix, Xandros, or Suse. Extra points if you can do it with a Nigel Tufnel accent.
Although I do have to admit that Slackware is a pretty cool name.
Ed Bott 
The correct name is Windows Vista (separated by space).
Heh. Ed, you forgot the whole Lindows/MichaelSoft/Linspire debacle. Great list though. I still like Pirillo’s suggestion of iWindows – that would have been interesting.
Welcome to New Mexico by the way. Sorry you’re dealing with stupid Comcast tricks right now. I’m sure you’ll get it sorted out.
Thanks, Artan. I’ve corrected the headline.
The original release had only the picture, which shows the logo with both words together. (Of course, Windows XP is the same way.) The release now has the text as well.
I just want to be the first to say this – when it blows up, the standard phrase will be “Hasta La Vista, Baby!”
Most of the names you mention there are the product name and relate to the “Windows” part of “Windows Vista”. It’s Suse 8, RedHat 9, Fedora 3.244323454 and so on. The Apple names you gave are codenames (Tiger, Panther, Jaguar, meow) and relate to Longhorn. Vista is different. Vista is the final word that tells us what version of Windows this is and unfortunately doesnt do it very well. It still sounds like a codename. It isnt catchy, it isnt cool and it will lead to a lot of lame jokes about Windows leaving the O/s world (“asta la vista”). It would almost have been better to hear it called “Windows 2006”.
The longer it’s release drags out, the more dissapointed I get with Longhorn. We’re yet to see a decent UI or any functionality that XP cant give us and now it has a crappy name. What’s going on at Microsoft?
Ben, I disagree. It’s Mac OS X Tiger (owned by Apple). RedHat Enterprise Linux. Suse Linux (owned by Novell). Etc. etc. Windows is the operating system family, analogous to Mac OS X or Linux. The funny names are branding for a particular generation/distribution. So XP and Vista are analogous to Tuger and Panther and Gentoo and Ubuntu and Fedora. Version numbers are a technical detail mostly hidden in advertising and relevant only when making patch/upgrade decisions.
Actually, come to think of it –
Ubuntu Linux (some number)
Fedora Linux 3
Redhat Linux 8
Microsoft Windows Vista
Apple MacOS X
Company/Group Name of O/s version
Apple are a little different, but they’re still the original codenames. Like whatever they’re next cat is going to be called…
I have no idea if that’s going to line up properly and I may be wrong, but that’s how I’ve always seen it.
Actually, I think Ubuntu is a cool name.
According to http://www.ubuntulinux.org/,
“Ubuntu” is an ancient African word, meaning “humanity to others”. Ubuntu also means “I am what I am because of who we all are”.
I think that’s sweet. Really.
I had no idea. OK, I agree, Ubuntu is a very cool name. Definitely cooler than Vista.