Lots of digital ink has been spilled over the past week or so as pundits, visionaries and other important (and self-important) commentators rushed to explain the whys and wherefores of Microsoft's announcement that its next operating system would be named Vista. Lots of talk about the internal "debate" to choose a name. Lots of bad jokes quoting one of Arnold Schwarzenegger's more famous movie lines. All of this, though, merely obscured what I feel is the real reason the name was announced now.

It distracted many folks from the shipment of the first beta version of the software, which was also announced!

Even I had thought we were on beta 532 by now. But, no. Evidently for all these years we've been talking about alpha (or earlier) software. Back in 2002, in my Windows Networking Tips newsletter, I wrote: "most folks were saying that the next version (code-named Longhorn) won't be out until the second half of 2004." A year later, I had to report: "the big news for those of us who follow operating systems was that [Longhorn] won't ship until 2005."

Now we're being told that Vista, the operating system formerly known as Longhorn, might - if we're really lucky - be with us for the 2006 "holiday season." But no one is specifying which holiday. Even then, we're told, this might necessitate cutting a few more features out of the package.

Soon, of course, there won't be anything left but a boot loader, GUI and browser.

We've been hearing about Longhorn/ Vista for a half dozen years, since even before the Longhorn code name was chosen. An entire industry seems to have grown up just to cover what's being added to, removed from or modified in the next desktop operating system from Microsoft. That feeds the feeling that, because it's been so long since the last desktop operating system shipped, this next one needs to be a blockbuster. Maybe it's time we all paid attention to something else until the day Vista ships.

When I heard the name announcement, I didn't think of Schwarzenegger's quote from "Terminator 2: Judgment Day." No, I thought back to the old Fibber McGee and Molly radio program. Fibber lived at 79 Wistful Vista, and wistful ("Full of wishful yearning," according to the dictionary) was how I felt, with a yearning to finally get this operating system onto retail shelves.