No less than Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer will headline the show tomorrow, presiding over a Nasdaq event billed as "A New Day for Business," in which most of the major computer makers, including Dell, HP, and Lenovo, will also appear to display Microsoft's software on their machines.

First up? Windows Vista, some five years in the making and two years past due. Vista is the successor to the widely used Windows XP for both consumer and business computers, boasting no small number of enhancements.

Among the updates are Aero, a sleek interface that needs high-end hardware to run, and a wave of security improvements to protect users against phishing, hacking, and the cocktail of threats that confront anyone who surfs the Web.

Office Expansion

Microsoft has a new version of Office, too, now called the Office System, with a whopping 13 components from nuts-and-bolts basics like Word, Excel, and PowerPoint, to lesser-known tools such as Groove, which lets team members share calendars, documents, and other data .

Other Office System titles include OneNote, which helps students organize digital notes with an interface that resembles a notepad, and Publisher, for signs, brochures, flyers, sell sheets, and even basic Web sites.

Microsoft's new version of Exchange -- Exchange 2007 -- combines e-mail, voicemail, and faxing into one corporate platform, helping knowledge workers keep track of the dozens of times per day that people write, call, fax, or otherwise try to hunt them down in an age where "technology" has become a synonym for "now."

Better with Age?

Whether it's a well-deserved complaint or pure calumny, Microsoft is known for releasing software with dozens or even hundreds of bugs, then improving the applications as user complaints, requests, and suggestions filter in. But this time could be different.

Vista, Office, and Exchange have been widely tested -- so widely tested, in fact, that reports put the total number of beta testers in the millions. Indeed, "testing" is the standard (and widely accepted) response that Microsoft offers to explain the two-year delay in Vista's release.

"They've made a significant effort to focus on quality, stress testing, and why the operating system would crash at certain times," said Forrester vice president and research director Simon Yates, an expert in PC hardware and software. "They've made some pretty significant changes to the process for developing Vista that was very different than XP," he said.

Among the most important changes, according to Yates, is the fact that Microsoft released beta versions of Vista only when most of its features had been added. In prior versions of Windows, Microsoft betas had incomplete feature sets that kept users from vetting the system fully.

"In this case, they started with essentially a feature-complete version of Vista," said Yates. "So all of the features in Vista have had a lot more time to be tested than features in Windows XP."