Live from the UK launch of Windows Vista

We'll be honest, this isn't going to be quite as dramatic as last night's event in New York - most significantly, we're inside an auditorium with no view of a building for dancers to unfurl the Windows Vista logo on. However, we do have Bill Gates here in person to explain just what we should be getting excited about,and he's going to have a few special guests and be announcing some UK-specific goodies that are coming to Windows Vista PCs. We'll be updating this post as the event goes on - with some speed, so please forgive any spelling mistakes!

10.20 - And we're off! Rock music and video playing showing off what Windows Vista can do. Gordon Frazer, MD of Microsoft UK, has taken the stand, telling us how the one word that sums up today is "Wow." We have a very special "Wow" in the form of our first speaker, Mr Bill Gates.

"This is a special occasion. We have worked hard to create this software platform, and we are looking forward to what people can do with it."

"In 1983 came the first version of Windows, and people were sceptical about how programmers and users would accept it. Twelve years later, in 1995, came a major milestone - the last time we introduced Office and Windows together. It was the first 32-bit system, but they weren't thinking about online learning, telephony, email, multiplayer games."

The browser we added laid the foundation for what exploded into the internet phenomenon, and for Windows Vista, the platform has been laid for something new.

"The way people buy and sell products, the revolution of telephony and television. Even the shows will be personalised. Shows will be longer. If they're educational, you'll have a chance to interact. We're also taking entertainment to a new level, taking games to a whole new level of realism - connecting up to other players."

"We've also done special versions of Windows, like Media Center and Tablet - letting students have a device that allows them to work without having paper textbooks. We're just at the very beginning of that, just beginning to see what we can do."

"Windows and Office have some great features built into them. Ease of use; things like Search and Flip3D that let you navigate around. As the internet becomes mainstream, avoiding phishing and malware is important, so we've built that in. There's also a big first in parental controls. I told my son about them and he said: 'Jeez, is it going to be like this for the rest of my life?' For my daughter, I can see the sites she's viewing and approve the games she's playing."

"There's also a lot of plumbing in here for VOIP and very high-quality video-type things. A lot of things that have to do with being a better entertainment platform - organising your photos, Movie Maker enables high-definition editing, burning to DVD."

"Office 2007 is also a major, major release. Embracing the XML standard we released ten years ago, embracing SharePoint, the new user interface we call the Ribbon, making features easier to use, giving people more power to create what we call 21st century documents."

"We have a lot of people to thank - obviously the people who made this, but also the beta testers. Over 5 million people helped make this the highest quality product we've ever released. We also picked 50 families in 7 countries around the world, sat down with them, and there were 800 fixes and changes based on what they said to us."

"The strength of Windows is the ecosystem around it. The Windows environment has always had ten times as many applications as any other platform. Every time we move the platform up to a new level, we're amazed by what the software industry goes and does with it. We'll see a few examples today; there are many thousands of others around the world. They can be small things, like gadgets - Universal, IMG... there's one I understand about gambling; we won't be able to use that in the United States but I'm sure it'll be used here.

I would like to say how thankful we are to the British Library for being here at this great venue, and it's also very fitting...

Lynne Brinley, CEO of the British Library has taken the stage. She's telling us that we've walked here over the top of eight basements filled with archive material. This is one of the greatest libraries in the world, but they've had problems making it accessible. It's a problem the Library shares with Microsoft. Bill again...

"Our vision about empowerment has included the idea of getting information at your fingertips. We have a big challenge with old material - how do you scan that, how do you organise that, what are the standards? At all levels, helping people get to the stuff they want is a great challenge."

They're announcing a new technology that enables the British Library to create 3D recreations of historic texts. Bill explains:

"Taking the experience and making it real takes a new kind of plumbing. There's another element of making it easy to scan. Windows Vista enables all those things: quick rendering, reducing the laborious work that had to be done before."

Lynne continues:

"For us, the key benefit is the simplification of the process. Before, it took us weeks to do a single book; now it's something we can do in a couple of hours. This version, which we call Turning the Pages 2.0 is a great "Wow" for us."

"In order to celebrate this moment in a fitting way, we approached Bill with a special request that only he could grant us."

"I brought this notebook," says Bill. "It's the Codex Leicester, by Leonardo da Vinci. Da Vinci was a great scholar; he built these notebooks about how light worked, how water worked, how weapons would work. Each of these notebooks is an amazing document."

So what's he going to do with it? "Bill holds the Codex Leicester in his private collection. We hold the Codex Arundel. To celebrate this collaboration, we decided the first use of this technology was to reunite these documents for the first time in 500 years. For six months from today, student can go to the British Library website and compare pages and view comments."

Bill again: "He intended to take these things and get them all organised, but never did that. These notebooks are scattered throughout Europe and were never brought together; now we can. "

Bill's left the stage now, and we're hearing about the importance of digitising these documents. With the launch of Turning the Pages 2.0, they're launching the next generation of digital texts. It's a more dynamic interface that allows people to pick up the book, rotate it, and compare different texts - something that's almost impossible in the real world, with texts held by different institutions all over the world.

There's the ability for researchers to leave group notes alongside the texts; any scholar in the world will be able to leave comments right next to the text they're referring to, either for their own reference or for others to see. Historians of science and art - mathmaticians, engineers - will be able to exchange ideas in a way that was all but impossible before.

Lynne Brinley explains: "The revolution in scholarship that began with Wikipedia and the raft of sites under the Web 2.0 heading can now continue. Research that would have taken months in reading rooms can now be done at the click of a mouse; all sorts of texts, books, and newspapers can be made available."

"To make this a truly public advancement, supported by the Minister of Culture, who's here in the audience today, the British Library is announcing a competition for public libraries to make £10,000 worth of digital texts available."

Now we're on to the rest of the presentations; Cynthia Crossley from Microsoft UK is introducing a video and live performance from The Feeling. We'll be back later with more announcements from the day.