"The wow starts now," Bill Gates, the Microsoft chairman, promised this morning.

Unveiling the consumer version of Vista, the long-awaited update of the Windows operating system, the world's richest man hyped up new features, including improved internet search, controls that allow parents to keep tabs on their offspring's PC habits (a favourite in the Gates house, we were told), and revamped "plumbing" designed to handle internet telephony and high-definition video downloads.

All of these are designed to burnish Microsoft's credentials in the internet era. The company has often been criticised for not spotting the potential of the web and for losing out to brash young pretenders such as Google in hugely lucrative new markets.

As PCs continue to make their transition from work tools consigned to the study to leisure machines found in the living room, Microsoft wants Vista to be at the heart of your digital home – to be the tool you ultimately rely on to buy and store music, while you edit your holiday snaps and watch internet TV.

As he banged that message across, one of Mr Gates's mantras this morning was "Vista is fun". But the serious security issue will also be key.

Analysts say that Vista, which took five years to develop, is the most secure operating system built by Microsoft. That view was repeated by Mr Gates, as he pointed out how Microsoft had garnered the help of millions of volunteers to test the system.

However, the same analysts also point out that Vista only matches – and does not beat – Apple's rival OS X system. Moreover, the real test for Vista's defences against hackers, phishers and other cybercriminals begins today, when it has to fend for itself in the real world.

Vista's expected popularity (it is likely to be installed on at least 200 million PCs in the next year) plays against it here – the bad guys will always target the most popular system first.

There will no doubt be glitches over the next few months – Vista has about 50 million lines of code, and nobody expects all of the bugs to have been ironed out. But the foundations for its success have been steadily laid since 1983, when the first Windows systems hit the shelves.

As Mr Gates pointed out this morning, the "Windows ecosystem" has always had ten times as many software applications built for it as any other standard – hardly surprising since it commands around 90 per cent of the PC market.

In truth, the new Windows relies less on any "wow" factor than on the fact that most of us already use it.

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